The Only Love I Know
by Havoc
Summary: Can Buffy and Willow's friendship survive all of Buffy's new secrets and the truth that Willow has found out about Buffy?
1. Ask

**The Only Love I Know**

"I am hardly an expert in matters of love, being new to the emotion myself... But I have read histories, ancient sagas, poetry... and it seems to me that love is a powerful motivation, but not one that invariably motivates men toward good. I think, perhaps, that [he] does love [her], in his own way and as far as he is able. And that could be just as dangerous as if he hated her."

Theresa Edgerton _The Work of the Sun_

_Won't somebody listen  
Nobody gets in  
My body's a temple  
But nothing is simple  
Silence is golden  
I have been broken  
Something was stolen  
Safe in my own skin_

Garbage "Silence is Golden"

Pale skin, paler, palest. Ghost-like in the night when he comes to me, almost invisible wrapped in his black, hidden by the danger he carries with him everywhere he goes. Fingers hard against my body, wordless cries in the night, heat and cold sliding against each other in a timeless dance. Sweet pain drifting across my body as he goes deeper, holds me tighter. This is the only place that I'm real, here, in his arms, under his body, enfolded by living death. Here I'm safe. The only thing that can hurt me is him, and I want the pain, want it like Willow wants magic, want it to live.

Too dangerous to bite my neck, too easy for others to see. Instead, his teeth graze my upper, inner thigh, looking for deeper blood, deeper pain. Blond hair disheveled by clutching fingers, trademark smirk lost in passion. Slippery kisses and stinging bites, hunger like nothing I've felt, icy trails up my body as his mouth goes everywhere.

No time here, no time when we're together. The world stands still, everything ends except for us, and we end too, spent, exhausted. Empty of everything that fills us when we're away. My salvation, my redemption, leading me to a new world, one I've never seen. Lost here with him, in lands unseen, wandering. No one knows what we are to each other. We don't even know, we lost the words long ago. Nothing said, only felt, and that's enough, that's everything.

I can loose myself in the memories of him almost as easily as the reality.

"Buffy?"

Willow, and at the worst, moment, when I'm not dressed, when everything that she can never finds out shows against my body black and blue, unmistakable. Keep the door closed, keep her out, just for a moment, just for forever. She'll never understand, no one will ever understand.

"Um, just a second, hang on," but she doesn't. Doesn't listen. Never listened, hasn't since I got back. Hasn't since before I died, or she never would have done this. Huh. Wouldn't it be funny if this was somehow all her fault?

She's staring now, and humanity is so far from me now, so lost in between death and life and the darkness where I spend my nights that I can't think of anything to say. She sees everything, the scratches, the bruises, the bite marks. And she looks horrified, like I'm something ugly. Am I ugly? I had forgotten that I even had a reflection; everything I am, I can see in Spike's eyes, and he always tells me that I'm beautiful.

Finally she speaks; sounds like she hasn't spoken in forever, either, her voice rusty, her mouth still having trouble forcing words out about what she sees. "What happened?"

Can she not know? Could anyone really look at me and not see his marks everywhere, inside, outside? But she's still staring, and I start to think that I can get through this. "Lost a fight." Not true, started the fight, so that he could end the fight and we could both come screaming into the night. She'll never understand. But this she'll believe.

"You don't lose." Absolute certainty there, and that's not good. I've lost at least twice to my count, and both times, someone's brought me back, someone's fixed my little mistake. Before it's too late. Too late. A laugh, a joke. My skin was rotting off my body by the time she dragged me back last time. How much too late could a person get before you're past the point of no return. Why doesn't it ever occur to anyone to save me before I die?

They're the only ones who save me. Just the vampires, just the things I was born on the earth to kill, but whenever I'm so lost I feel like I'll never find myself again, it was them, Angel and Spike, who stepped in. Everyone is so busy waiting for me to save them that they stand around staring. Some days I think I've lost my taste for anything human.

Whoops. Silence fell and I didn't even notice. Willow looks pale, almost as pale as Spike, but on her it just makes her look sick. She tries some words out, discards them before she gets farther than a syllable, finally comes up with, "Did you try to lose?" She looks scared and I want to laugh from how badly she misunderstands everything.

She thinks I'm trying to die again. And okay, maybe she's right, but it's sure not the way that she's thinking. I die in his arms everything, and he dies with me, and when the night falls again, we're reborn in each other's arms. He kills me, just like he always promises to, and does it so gently that I can still live in the sunlight. But Willow is still waiting for me to speak, and I need to find some story that she'll believe. "Big demon. Very big. But I got him." Sure did, he was moaning my name by the time I was done.

"You kill him?" Oh, yeah... they used to call it the little death. Nothing little about what we do together. Death is nothing to us, other people's problems.

"Yeah, totally dead."

She's still staring, but I've noticed that people only hear what they want to hear, only see what they want to see. The evidence is all over me, they could try and dust Spike for all the things he's done to me, but she just looks and doesn't understand.

Once upon a time, I would have been able to tell her. We were best friends, we told each other everything. Not anymore. Willow didn't tell me that magic burned like a drug in her veins, not until it almost killed my sister, almost my daughter, blood of my blood, bone of bone, made from a rib like Eve for her Adam. And so I don't tell her about Spike, about the dark things that we do to each other when no one else is around.

But her eyes have this quiet look in them, like I know something I'm not telling, like I don't trust her anymore. Hell, I don't. How could I, how can I? She does everything for herself. No thoughts for anything or anybody but herself. I remember all the times I tried to tell her the truth, and all the times it didn't work, cause something else came up. Raising the dead is fine and dandy, but being their friend, well, I guess that's too hard.

But this is Willow. In my first life, my innocent life, I had never had a friend like Willow before. She was always there, through my first death and back again. We did everything together. We whispered in the dark of the night. We played in the sunlight together. Some days, I can't believe that the sun won't kill me, can't believe that Spike and I haven't messed up somewhere and turned me when we weren't paying attention. Can't believe I don't lie in dust at her feet. What am I supposed to say to her? All my whispers are for Spike; they strangle in my throat, knot and tie up like Spike and his silken ropes.

She's turning to go, and all my chances are going out the door with her. Ask! Ask! You can't be this blind, you can't be this stupid! Look at me, do you think that I let a demon this close? On accident? You think I let this happen and never fought back for no reason at all? You're blind, you're so blind, wrapped in your own special midnight, a million times blacker than any place where Spike and I wind up. Who are you to talk about anything, when there's nothing you see.

But she's turning back, and the worry is still in her face. Is there a friendship here, anywhere, buried in the rubble of our addictions, our secrets, our lies? I haven't covered up, I'm standing here in a bra and jeans, and Spike's handiwork, and she's just staring. "Buffy, are you okay?"

Okay? What a laugh. What is okay, what am I supposed to measure that against? Yeah, you know, Will, compared to all those other people on their third life, I'm great. Of course, only cats get more chances that I do, and hey, it's not that hard to make a cat unhappy, but it's the thought that counts. There's a laugh somewhere deep inside in me, but I don't let it out because it's not any humor that Willow would understand.

"Buffy, are you... happy?"

And that's a harder question. Some days I feel like a child, like I'm only the two months it's been since she brought me back. I want to lie down, I want to scream and yell. What can I say to her that she'll ever understand. I don't understand. Does she know anything? Will she see anything? Is there any way that I can dream that she'll understand that this is as happy as I get, lost in time with Spike, with my secrets and my dreams?

I look everywhere but at her. They never changed my room, they kept it like a shrine. Willow must have been planning my resurrection since my body hit the ground. It's only Spike and Dawn that I can't be mad at, cause, if anything, they were more surprised that I was when I came back. Finally, I whisper in a voice I thought I'd lost a couple of lives ago.

"Yeah, Will, I'm happy."

It's almost the truth, it's a shade of honesty. It's better than saying that I think this is as good as it gets. That I'm not what I was, that she screwed up and made me wrong, so that now the only things I want in life are to fight and fuck Spike. That he can hurt me and only me, not the usual promises whispered between lovers.

I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know who I am. But I know that the sun's going down and that he'll be awake soon. I know that he loves me in a way that no one else can anymore. And it's proven when Willow sighs unhappily and leaves the room. Leaves everything unspoken between us, like it doesn't matter. Like I don't matter to her anymore. Maybe I am ugly. Maybe I did come back wrong and Willow knows it and that's why she's forever leaving.

But there's a scratch at the window, and I can see a cigarette burn in the darkness outside the glass and Willow is gone from my thoughts again as Spike lures me out into the dark, to even more forbidden moments between us. Tomorrow, she'll see me. Tomorrow, she'll understand. Tomorrow, she'll make me tell her the truth. And for now, there's the truth between Spike and I, all the lies and loves that we tell each other.

No one even notices that I leave at night, no one sees that I'm gone. Course not, they barely see that I'm missing when I'm right in front of their eyes, so why should notice now? It's like high school again, my lover at the window, the two of us slipping away where no one ever looks.

We start fair, we start right. First, there's the patrol, because I'm the slayer and that's what I do. So we hunt together, and we fight together and when we've killed our fill for the night, then we fight each other. And then we love each other, even if no one else would ever call what we share love. What do they know, anyway? They've always lived in the light, they cast shadows when the sun bears down on them. I'd sleep the day away if I could, as inhuman as any of the demons I kill. Slayers are born for the dark, they're made for the night and I don't know why or how I spent so long fighting it. It's easier to give in, to be what I was meant to be. All that human stuff I tried for years, all it did was get me dead and deader.

Afterwards, when we're still, when our blood has cooled and quieted, I watch Spike smoke his traditional cigarette. It's like tasting him again when I watch him smoke, when his stained breath curls into my lungs. I only ever think of Spike now when I smell cigarette smoke, I only ever remember these quiet times, when the need for words passes us by without stopping.

But I change the game tonight, I make things new, because he should know what Willow saw. What Willow refused to see. What she's almost certainly forgotten, because what's my pain to her? Even so, the words are hard to say, the hardest thing I've done in months is to tell him this new truth.

"Willow. She saw me today."

A lazy breath, unneeded, done just for the fun of it. "Yeah, pet? Did she like what she saw then?"

Trust Spike to look at it that way. He's always swearing that I'm never sexier than when I'm wearing his bruises. Stands to reason he thinks Willow would think the same, only makes sense that he would think that she was like us. That this was something normal people did.

"She asked if I lost of a fight."

She thought I threw it. She thinks I have a death wish. She thinks she should never have brought me back. She's right. She's right about it all, but that's something that I can barely tell myself, much less anyone else. Even Spike, keeper of all my new secrets, even he couldn't take the pain of hearing that I wanted to lose myself again. That some nights I can't sleep for missing the cold comforts of my grave.

He laughs then, midnight black and wicked. He thinks its funny. Maybe it is. "That's rich, love, it truly is. You set her straight? You tell her how we fight?" He trails cold fingers over my body, relishing every bit of me. That touch, simple and yet so profound, reminds me again I have I come to him, why I stay with him. Because with him, I'm real again. With him, I'm just Buffy, just the Slayer. With him I'm strong. He makes me real again, he makes me true when all I feel when we're apart is a lie.

"I tried," I whisper, looking into his eyes, the blue of a summer sky he'll never see again. Not even in the mirror. He's more imaginary than me; there's so little holding him to this world. "I wanted her to know..."

"But..." he finishes, leaning in for a kiss, for something almost gentle after all of the pain. It's not that we don't know how to be kind to each other. It's just that we save it for the special moments, the quiet times. It's not all pain and blood. There's laughter too, and fun. We can be children with each other, we can forget all the things we really are. We can forget that we're killers.

"But she didn't see, and she didn't understand and then she left."

He rolls over, comfortable with this new information. Nothing surprises him; at least nothing has since our first time, the time I took him. Sometimes I think that was all the surprise that he could ever feel, all rolled up into one moment, so that now everything else is simply flat. Unsurprising. Without shock value. "Told you and told you, love, I'm the only one you have."

But she looked so lost when she left. She looked like maybe she would have stayed, if I had any idea of how to reach out to her. When did the distances become so great, when did the gulf get so deep? Where have I lost everybody to and what am I now? What did I come back as? And what did she change herself into, that she's so different from the girl I left behind? How did we lose each other in the night, when we used to always be holding hands?

Lonely again, hurting with some pain that I don't like, that I don't want, I reach for Spike and there's the familiar rush of comfort when I know he's reaching for me too. This distance I can cover, the ravine I can cross. This I can do. Spike's mouth is on mine, he hands are on me, and he's so close that I can feel exactly what he wants and then there's no more need for thought. There is only feeling, and I'm drowning in it, sinking fast into the icy waters of Spike's love, deep and dark as an ocean.

Later, I'll think about Willow later. Later...

Later always comes too soon, as unwelcome as the brutally bright sun that robs my room of restful darkness. Rolling over in bed, I wonder if today will finally be the day that she sees, the day that she understands. We got carried away last night, Spike and I, and now there are bruises that I don't think I can find a lie convincing enough to cover. Lost a fight will probably not work again any time soon, and I would have had to do more than lose to get these marks, the perfect bands of black and purple around my wrists. It's not Spike's fault that he forgets his own strength sometimes, when the passion is on him. Not my fault that I don't tell him to stop, nothing wrong with liking things a little different. One way or another, this is bound to get noticed; it's way too warm to wear any shirt long enough to cover these.

Right, day. Regular life, things to do, the routine now almost familiar, almost comfortable, if not truly natural. Dawn needs waking and feeding, Willow needs rousting out of her angsty depression over her one true love being anywhere but around her, household stuff needs to be done. Useless stuff needs to be done. How many hours till the night, how many hours until my real life starts over again? I'm a sleepwalker during the day, and no one even sees it. Least of all her, so wrapped in her shock and guilt over what's she done that it doesn't even occur to her to try to make it better. Maybe not that strange, maybe this is a as real as it gets until I die again and again, waiting for a death so complete there's no bringing me back. Until then, the routine.

Willow's a little more with it today. I can feel her eyes on my wrists, feel her curiosity as she watches how stiff I move. She never used to be stupid. The magic has done things to her, changed her in ways that I don't think that she's noticed yet, because the Willow I used to know would never had let things go on like this, would never have let me keep this many secrets. Now though, she just watches, her eyes serious and cool, no thoughts that I can see.

To her credit, she waits till Dawn is out of the house before she says anything.

"Lose another fight?" Maybe it will work again. Maybe she is that naive. Maybe she's that firmly entrenched in her belief that everything will be alright. Maybe she's a fool.

"Yeah, well, I've been tired. Klutzy." Yeah, I can only fight Spike so long before I let him get the upper hand, before I'm lost in the things he does to me. Some nights, I surprise myself by wondering how it was that Dru could have ever left. Other nights, I promise myself that the next time, the next time I'll ask, because there must be a story there somewhere. And on the rarest nights, on the bluest moons, I think that I shouldn't let him do these things to me. That maybe whatever is that's wrong with me, whatever creature that I've turned into, maybe I don't need to let it consume me.

She swallows hard; she's so thin now, after losing Tara, after losing her magic, that I think I can actually see the words in her throat before she says them. Or maybe the simplest explanation is the truest; I've spent so much time with Spike that I always look at the throat first. Vampire foreplay as well as the easiest method of defense. The words are crawling up slowly, wrapping themselves in knots and untangling themselves slowly. Finally, she comes up with, "Those are new bruises, and they're pretty bad."

I shrug. "Not too bad; they look worse then they feel." Ask! Just ask! How can you not see what's right in front of your face? How can you not see what I'm doing? How can you not understand? You used to understand everything. I was always good for the fighting, but you were knowledge girl. Where has all your knowledge gone now? Who are you now? Maybe it's too much to hope that my face shows any of this. Her face has never given anything away; why should mine be any different?

Willow is biting her lip. She hasn't done that since high school. She wants to say something. I want to help her, I want to reach out to her, but she's left me so alone, she's left me in this hard new/old world and the only thing she ever asked from me was a thank you. A thank you for my life in hell. A thank you for pain that never ends, for a reality so sharp it cuts me everything time I move too fast. I can't reach past that. There are dimensions between us now, all of heaven and hell is between us now and it's going to have to be her. It's gonna have to be her, or it will never be at all.

When she finally does something, it's the last thing that I expect, the last thing everyone has done. She reaches out and she touches me. It's been so long since anyone but Spike has touched me that her warmth feels strange, feels alien. Is this what he feels when I lie against him, or I am as dead as he is? Her hands are gentle on me as she pulls my wrists up, closer to her, turning them this way and that, holding them up to the light.

"These aren't from a fight. Are they." Not a question. Maybe it's never been a question. Everything I've been waiting for is crashing down on top of me and I have no idea of what to say anymore. I thought I had this all worked out, thought I knew what I was going to say, how I was going to say it. But now I'm lost and I think Willow's trying not to cry.

"No. Not a fight."

"And not from you."

"Not from me," and now she is crying. Not loud, not wild, just the slow trail of tears down her cheeks, just the tiniest tremble of her lips as she takes my words in. She doesn't know what to say, that much is clear. She's trying not to show what she's feeling, she's trying not to lose it and go hysterical, even I can see that.

I totally expect her next question will be who, and that will be a whole new box of trouble because how do I explain how it is that Spike can hurt me when neither one of us understands it ourselves. She'll want to get the chip fixed, she'll want to stake Spike, she'll want to ruin the only thing that I have left. She'll want me to be all alone again.

But she doesn't ask. She doesn't ask anything like I could have imagined. She only asks one word, just one. "Why?" She's touching the bruises like she's never seen anything like them before.

Why...why...why...? Because I can. Because we can. Because I'm not who I thought I was. Because I'm not what I thought I was. Because it feels so damn good. A thousand reasons why go swirling through my head, all vivid, all real. But I go for the simplest. I go for the one that started it all, the one that I never forget. "Because then I can feel."

If I wanted this to be the amazing bonding point that will bring us back together again after months of pain and lies, I'm wrong. She's not talking to me at all now, she's not even touching me anymore. I think I can hear her being sick in the downstairs bathroom. I guess there's more than one truth she can't handle, one more thing that she didn't really want to know.

My only reaction is to look at the clock. How many hours left till sunset?

To Be Continued...


	2. Answer

**The Only Love I Know**

Spike is surreally solicitous when he sees my wrists. In a move that reminds me that the last time he was human was deep into the Victorian age, he takes my hands in his and kisses my bruises, not even turning it into anything kinky. And his eyes are kind when he looks at me, and his smile is William, the Bloody Awful Poet and I know I can never tell Willow who because there are whole people living inside his body that she'll never see and to kill one of them is to kill them all.

"Was it bad, pet? he asks. Did they see?"

He'll never understand Willow's response. He'll never understand how I let her run away. But this is Spike, and there are only a few things left that I'll lie to him about, and I don't think that this is one of him. His eyes are on me, seeing me more clearly than anyone else has in months, and I finally say, "Yeah, Willow saw."

His eyebrow quirked up, distorting his scar, drawing my attention. For a second, I can't hear his words. In some ways, we're still new to each other, and even the simplest things will draw our focus away from whatever we should be doing.

"What? I'm sorry, did you ask something?"

His smile is smug; he knows why I didn't listen the first time. "What I asked, Slayer, was what you said. Should I expect not to wake up some day soon? Is there some sharp wood in my future?"

"I didn't tell her it was you. I didn't tell her it was anybody."

Now he's almost laughing. "You told your best mate that you tie yourself to your own bed and what, exactly? Try to throw yourself off? You're maybe trying to be the next Houdini and you're still pretty bad at it?"

Put that way, it is almost funny. Or maybe my new sense of humor is as warped and wrong as everything else about me. In me.

"No, she's knows it was somebody. She didn't want to know who. Didn't care, I guess."

"And isn't that what I keep telling you? That I'm the one who here's for you, the only one who doesn't turn away. Don't know why you keep bothering to do anything with those whelps." He pauses, considers. "Nah, the Nibblet's right enough, but those others..."

Some nights I have to wonder if he doesn't have a point here. If my friends have moved on, moved away, since I died. I mean, it only stands to reason. Isn't that what you're supposed to do when someone dies? Move on with your life? There's nothing about me that isn't totally against the natural order of things. But I'm wandering again, getting lost in my own mind. That's happening more and more lately; sometimes it scares me. Most times, I don't think about it. I was saying something, though, I'm sure of it.

"Why!" I announce suddenly, and Spike stares at me quizzically, since it's clear that I'm not asking a question. I try to clarify. "She asked why."

He moves towards me then, all predator, danger in leather and denim, a wicked smile on his lips, the hint of fang. "And whatever did you tell her, pet? he whispers, breathing in my scent."

This I know, this is the first step in a now familiar dance. "I told her that doing this was the only thing that I could feel."

He's closer now, and I reach out to touch him, to pull him closer. He hisses in pain as I touch him, my hands hard on old bruises, but that only makes his eyes glow in anticipation. It's never just me that gets hurt. It's never just me. I'm as rough with him. I am. "What do I make you feel?" he murmurs, his fangs grazing my throat, delicate torture, a hint of things to come.

He's still too far, so I grab at him, pull him against me. "Alive," I answer, and bite into his lip, lick at the coppery blood that rushes to the surface. He moans softly in appreciation and leans in for a kiss.

"You're right, pet. I'm the one that makes you alive. The one that makes you real. The only one..." And then there are other, more interesting things to do with our mouths, and I know that conversation is over, maybe for the night. This is easier than thinking. This is what I need.

It's the early hours of morning when I finally come home, safe in the knowledge that a newly repentant Willow will never leave Dawn alone. I don't think that Dawn's forgiven Willow yet. I'm not sure she ever will, either for driving Tara away, Tara who was the next thing to a mother to Dawn, or for nearly getting Dawn herself killed that one time. But there doesn't need to be any forgiveness there. There doesn't need to be anything, except Dawn safe in her bed, asleep.

It's late enough that I don't expect anyone to be up when I come in. I'm used to the shadows of a sleeping house, the air of quiet in those dark hours when everyone's lost in their own dreams and I can be alone with the waking nightmare of my own life.

Which is why it's such a shock to see Willow sitting on the couch, tinted amber by the light of a small lamp. She's awake, and she's waiting for me. It's the only thing that's readily obvious about this situation.

Her face is serious, that looks she gets when she wants people to sit down, shut-up and listen. But I'm not talking, I feel more comfortable standing and I'm not sure if there's anything that she can say that I want to hear. She thinks she knows something. She thinks she knows everything. I doubt she's right. There's very little that she has been right about since I came back. Hell, bringing me back was the first crack in the Willow I knew and those cracks are getting deeper by the day. You can very nearly see her falling apart in front of your eyes.

"You've been with him, haven't you?" Her voice is shaking only a little when she speaks. She must have been practicing. This ought to be fun.

Spike was careful tonight. There's nothing new to see in plain sight. Anything new is safely hidden by my clothes. I stare at her, silent, unblinking. Hey, she was the one that left this morning. She was the one throwing up because whatever I am is that disgusting to her. What does she think I'm going to tell her now? What on earth does she think she's ready to hear? Ah, screw it. She needs to wake up. She needs to grow up. "Yeah, I was with him."

"Shouldn't you be patrolling? Isn't that your job?" Oh, so now this all about how I'm neglecting my responsibilities. Because she's so much the person to talk, playing at magick with Amy all night long, dragging my girl to the witch's equivalent of a crack house. Right, and there's no such thing as vampires. Tell me another story. I'm not nearly tired yet.

"The two aren't mutually exclusive." And that's a hint, if she bothers to listen. If she's not all caught up in feeling righteous and moral.

I think she might almost be understanding now cause she's swallowing again, convulsively. Probably another sign that this conversation, too, will be called on account of sickness. Sorry, ref, no game today; the other team forfeits.

She's breathing deep now, trying to keep it under control. And now the show's really getting rolling. It's... nearly there, come on girl.

"You tried to talk to me about this, didn't you? That night I brought Amy back? This was what you were talking about? Your bad choice?"

Whoops, wrong answer, Will. Now I think it's the right choice. No, that's wrong. Now it's the only choice.

She closes her eyes a second, like I'm hurting her somehow. She doesn't have the faintest understanding of what real pain is, how deep it can go. Finally, she's ready to try again, she's trying to talk again.

"Um...it's...it's Spike. Isn't it?" She's asking like she's all cool with everything, but her eyes are begging me to tell her somebody, anybody, else. She doesn't want to hear this, but's she finally asking the right questions.

I look down at her, wishing I were in my bed so that I could touch all my new bruises and remember what it was like to be with him, safe. This is the hardest truth. "Of course it's Spike. Who else could it be?"

She closes her eyes like I hit her, like this is a gut punch to her mind. "Why?" she whispers in anguish.

I look at her coldly. I don't have time for this, and even less interest. "'Cause he loves me." I don't think I've ever really said that before. Not like it mattered, not like it was real. Now it's everything. He would never do what he does to me unless he loved me. I'm heading out of the room before she can even bring herself to look at me. It's clear that I'm nothing that she wants to see.

But her voice stops me before I can go very far. Her eyes are opened again, but she's looking away. The closest to a compromise that we can come to on this, I guess.

"His chip...when did it break? How long has he been able to hurt humans?"

A shiver of anger works its way down my spine and it's all I can do not to turn on her. Her fault. This is all her fault.

"That's the thing, Will. The chip is fine. Spike can't hurt humans. Just me."

If she has anything to say to that, I'm not hanging around to listen. Knowing Willow and her new-found capacity for denial, she'll probably think that Spike turned me. She'll probably think I'm a vampire. It would never occur to her that this is her doing, the consequence of whatever dark magick she used to pull me from my final rest. I've been angry at her for so long now. I've been angry since I came back and it just seems like everything she does makes me angrier. She's known the truth for weeks now, she's fully understood what she did for days and days and days and she doesn't say anything. Nothing real. So I'm forced to think this was all for her, that I was only secondary to her goal. She just wanted to try something deeper, something darker- and I'm not a fool, even if I'm so not a witch, there's not gonna be any convincing me that whatever spell she used to bring me back was right and clean and of the light- and whether or not I ever forgave her for what she did is, well, unimportant. Because if it had mattered, wouldn't she have said something, wouldn't she have done something about it by now. Wouldn't she have at least apologized?

She's silent as I walk away from her. Figures. So glad that we could have this little chat, so glad everything is all better now. At least there's the almost comfort that she looks like she enjoyed this conversation even less than I did.

Upstairs in my bed, staring at the moonlight-silver walls, I hold my pillow against my body and wish it were Spike, hating it when it gets warm. Spike is always as cool as rain against me, no warmer than the air around us. There are only shadows in the room to keep my company, and the loneliness comes crashing down around me again. There has to be a way to get away from all this again, the pain, the brightness, the look on Willow's face like I was the one who betrayed her. Am I really doing anything that wrong? When I start to cry, the despair in me so deep, so all consuming that I have no other choice, I force myself to do it quietly, so that she doesn't come back, so that she doesn't want to talk anymore. She'll want to know what I am now. That's a question I can't answer, that no one can answer. Spike and I debate it for hours. He's always on the side that I came back as something purely of the night; he wants so badly for it to be true, so that everything he feels that is so wrong can suddenly turn right. There are times I want that too, times when we almost convinces me. Because why else would I spend my nights with a demon I used to try to kill? Why else would I sleep with a creature that I used to hate? What am I now, what are any of us? We, all of us, have changed. We're nothing that we could have dreamed up before. When did we start to turn into everything that we fought?

Thoughts spin around in my brain so fast that I'm almost certain that I can't be a demon, because I've met enough of them to know that demons don't worry, demons don't not sleep for wondering what they are. So there's still no answer to the question of what I am. I don't even know who to blame. I've read enough Watchers' diaries to know that I'm the oldest living slayer in generations upon generations. Maybe we all turn to this, turn to ashes. Maybe we fight so hard that the humanity burns out of us, guttering like a candle in a draft.

Sleep is a long time coming tonight. It's always a long time coming.

In the morning, I come downstairs just long enough to take care of Dawn. She's not a part of this, she's an innocent, just like she always has been. The easiest part of coming back has been Dawn. Her feelings are so real, so pure, that even though I still feel cold and dead inside, when I'm with her, I can feel something like warmth curl inside me. To her, my return is nothing short of the best gift ever, and I bathe in her love like water. She's so beautiful. If I'm grateful for anything about living again, it's that I'll get to see her grow up. That I'll get to stay with her. So I steal whatever time I can have with her, because that does matter. That is real. If everything else faded into dreams and mist, I know that I could still reach out and touch Dawn, because she's part of me. All of me.

Willow is there too in the kitchen, trying and failing to eat. I don't pay any attention to her, though. The next move is hers. I've taken all the steps towards her that I'm ever going to, and all she's done is inch back, slowly, as if I were something to be scared of. No more. No more of this. I manage to say good morning, because Dawn will wonder if I don't, and she doesn't need to worry.

I send her off with a kiss to school. Sometimes I envy her so much, the way she could be made new, the way she could be made real. I wish someone would wave a magic wand at me and make over again. I covet her humanity, her place in this world, the place she made for herself in an existence that never expected her. I've changed so much, lost so much, all I want is for someone to make me new again. I imagine the pages of time turning back, making me young, making me innocent. But since that can never happen, I watch Dawn and I smile and I daydream about how things used to be.

I'm washing up the dishes as Dawn leaves, doing the household stuff cause the gang tells me that family services comes by, every now and then, just to make sure everything's cool, everything's fine. So reassuring to know that they were fooled by a robot for nearly four months. Makes me think that I don't really have all that much to worry about. I worry anyway, though, because I don't want anyone to take Dawn away from me. Neither of us wants that. My father doesn't even want that.

The weirdest thing about being alive again is the strange things you notice when you least expect them. Things like that fact that there's no real way to describe what water feels like on your body, no words that really convey what it's like to go from being dry to wet. Soap bubbles hold whole rainbows inside them, everything is new and yet somehow old.

It's not a surprise when Willow interrupts me. In fact, to me, it only stands to reason that she would end that one thing that's not Spike or Dawn to occupy my attention for who knows how long.

"How long?" she asks and I'm startled, because for a moment there I think she's just repeating my own thoughts. This conversation thing has been a slow thing to re-master. It's easier to be quiet, more relaxing to be silent. I don't have to try as hard.

It's a question, though, one that shows she sees me again, that I've pulled the scarf off her eyes. The anger is almost a relief after all the numbness. I'll take whatever reminders I can get that I'm not still six feet deep.

"About a month," I answer without looking. That eye contact thing is the death of us every time.

She's silent, thinking, wondering where to go with this next. "Why do you let him?"

"I thought I answered that already."

"Is it... is it..." more hesitant now. She's not sure what it is she's asking, not sure what she really wants to know. "Is it more than the pain? Does he... do more than hurt you?"

Willow makes it sound so bad, so wrong. It's not wrong. It's just different. Like I'm different. Despite all my own certainty, I can tell she'll never be convinced, that she'll never see this as anything but a perversion. I still try, though, even knowing that I'll never win.

"Of course. There's, there's a lot." It's hard to explain. "We're..." there must be an adjective here that I can use. Something that actually fits the situation. "We have fun."

That sounds so lame. So one dimensional. There are whole life spans between Spike and I, a million different parts to each of us. How do you put that in words?

"We match," I say finally, and hope that is all that she needs to hear. That she'll be content now, and leave it alone. After weeks of wanting her to ask, now all I want is for her to leave it alone.

I hear her before I feel her, coming up behind me, trying to be close again, in distance if not in thought, and put a hand on my shoulder. I can feel the bones in it. Everything has hit her so hard.

Her voice is quiet when she speaks, almost a whisper and yet it sounds like thunder when she speaks. "I'm sorry. If what's happened is my fault, I'm sorry."

So close, and yet not the apology I needed. "Are you apologizing for Spike and I being together? Cause somehow, that wasn't what I expected to hear. Isn't that sort of beyond your control? Or is that you think you can control everything?"

She's crying again, resting her head against my shoulder so that I can feel tears seep into my skin, salty sweet, the poison of grief. All it does it make me madder, and I spin around so fast she falls back, catching herself on the table before she falls.

"You're crying? You're crying? Look at me! Look at me! What am I? You have the nerve to cry about the fact that I sleep with Spike and have nothing at all to say about the fact that I'm not human anymore? What I am? What have you made me? You want something to cry about, cry about that! That whatever you did changed me so much that I don't know what I am anymore! Cry! Cry about that! Don't get all weepy about the only thing that makes me feel alive. Cry for yourself."

She's reaching out for me, tears streaming down her face. It's eerily reminiscent of the night she realized she was addicted to the magick, that it owned her now. What owns her now, what new fear has she found in herself that's she's reaching out like this?

"Buffy, I'm sorry!" The words sound like agony to her, like they've been ripped out of her very soul. She means it, I can tell. The words are in every line of her body, in every beat of her heart, in everything, and I wish I could make them mean enough. I wish they were enough.

I want to go to her so badly. She used to be my safe harbor. She used to be like a missing part of my flesh, a piece of my soul. Now I can barely recognize her. But I miss her, the pain so bad it feels like it will eat me alive. My face crumbles and cracks, I break to pieces. But it's too little, too late. No matter how far we stretch, there's no closing this void between us.

"I'm sorry, Will. I think it's too late."

To Be Continued...


	3. Balance

**The Only Love I Know**

During the day, there's nowhere to go. I walk like the ghost that I am, staying in the shadows, trying not to cry. There's nowhere to go. No job, no school, no life until the dark comes again and swallows me whole. All of this is just a reminder that this life isn't real, isn't right. What was it that demon said to me, the demon that Willow made when she brought me back? That I wasn't real, that I'll pop like a bubble, leaving nothing behind? And then she asked if I even had a choice about coming back. Eerie, the things demons know, the insights that they have. I should have listened to her more, heard what else she had to say about my choices, or lack of them.

Choices. I have so few of them nowadays. I tried work, and I know I'll have to try again, but nothing feels right. It's all like clothes that don't fit, this one too tight, that one too loose, the last worst of all, someone else's life. It was sweet that they tried, I guess, sweet that they wanted to care, wanted to help, but it's not working. They all hope that their lives will go onto me seamlessly, a perfect match, but it's no use. Even Spike, who spends his days on his knees in the hope that I might be like him, even that didn't match. No, whatever I do or don't do, it's going to have to be my own choice. This life, my last life, it has to be my own. I have to figure out for myself who I am right now.

I should go to Spike's crypt. I should lose myself in him, to him. When we're together, it's like a drug, dulling all my senses, stealing my memory. There's only him. There's only me. There's only us, and the sun outside the door while we stay in the dark. It's not like I want to think about this travesty that my life's turned into. It isn't as if things are all going to get better if I just concentrate real hard and then maybe click my heels together for luck.

There's that one catch though, the one thing keeping me out in the sun no matter what else my body wants: Willow said she was sorry; Willow cried. So now I need to figure out what that means, if that changes anything. Decisions need to be made now, because we've reached a crossroads, she and I. If I can't forgive her for this, I can't forgive any of them for it, and I need to walk away. Five years of friendship and a thousand memories will turn to dust, and I'll only have Spike and Dawn and no human life but it's possibly better than looking at them and feeling the anger eat through me like an acid. If I can forgive, though, if I can forgive... we get it all back. I won't be able to forget, I don't think any of us will be able to forget, but we might be able to move on. Changed, darker, older, but still together, still friends. I'm one of Anya's bridesmaids, and Tara loves my little sister like a daughter. Willow was the other side of myself for years and even the thought of losing her hurts like ripping another piece of my soul out. Xander's picked me up so many times I've lost count. All of this, and yet when I look at them, I can only see them through the red haze of rage, seeing them like a demon would, seeing only their ugliness, only their selfishness and none of the beauty. God, they were so beautiful. They glowed in the sun like diamonds. I don't want to lose that, I don't, but the fear that I already have won't leave me. I think I lost them when I died. I think that I lost everything.

I stare in a store window like I've never seen myself before. There are bruises everywhere, and the scars on my neck will never fade, a constant question and an endless lie. My eyes are empty, cold, nothing to see there, and my mouth is flat, as if I've forgotten how to smile. I'm death pale, seeing as I spent the best tanning months six feet underground. I don't know myself anymore, but the people who were my friends know me. They look at me and I'm familiar to them. There are no questions, because everyone already knows the answers. If I lose everything, if I drop this life behind me the way a snake sheds its skin, there will be questions again. There will be more lies. There will be a thousand more secrets than I'm keeping right now.

My hand touches Angel's scar, rubs the ridges and grooves and pretends it's a worry stone, while thoughts swirl through my mind, never still, never silent. This is pulling me apart, destroying me again, maybe more completely than death did. If I leave, and I die again, who will mourn me, who will remember me? Dawn's memories are a gift to her, nothing real, nothing earned, and Spike has only ever seen me through a thousand different passions, an eternal kaleidoscope of Buffys.

New determination guides me when I walk home, drags me back to the responsibilities and weights of a life I never asked to have. We need to have one last talk, Willow and I, because she's at the heart of all of this. She's the catalyst.

And she's the one who's not home when I get there. I go all through the house, looking, calling, but no Willow. It figures that, now, when I actually want to talk to her, she's nowhere to be found. The only sounds in the house are the ones I make, playing hide and seek by myself. Fine. This was a stupid idea, anyway, the idea that I could try and make everything right again. Nothing can ever be right again. She's probably out getting her kicks with magick again, hanging out with the amazing rat girl cause even an addict with no morals is a better friend then the girl who sleeps with her own best enemy. And lets him mark her. I probably make her sick. I bet she fell off the ol' spell casting wagon cause I disgust her so much. I mean, there's only so much throwing up that a girl can take, and then she has to do something fun, am I right?

I don't remember all that much from the English classes I've taken, probably because I barely showed up in them, if mind if not in body, but I think I remember learning that in Shakespeare's plays, when things start to go horribly wrong in nature, that means that things are going horribly wrong with the characters. It's all symbolic and stuff, tons of deep meaning. For the first time ever, I think that maybe my teachers weren't making these things up as they went along, because I'm certainly the worst thing that could ever happen to nature, I'm like this huge, glowing sign that nature got screwed, and certainly everything in my own life is going to hell in hand-basket, too. I'd say it's taking me with it, but I've been in hell since I saw those white satin walls all around and smelled the stench of my own lingering death. It's not that my life is going to hell. It's that my life figures it would be a good idea to join me where I live.

I'm just sitting on the couch when Dawn gets home. The T.V. is on, but I have no idea what's playing. I remember turning it on with the vague thought that it'd be nice to see what Spike liked so much about _Passions_ and then everything is a blur, a washed out haze. That's happening more and more often. At first I thought that living would become easier, the longer that it went on, but it just keeps getting harder and harder. I seem to lose more time every day, hours turning to minutes and then I have no explanation for where the time went, or what I did during it. It only seems to happen during the day, though, during those times when I feel like I have no control over anything. Another sign that I'm not meant for the day, that I'm something different from the average girl. Like I needed more reminders about that.

As soon as Dawn comes into the house, comes to join me on the couch, I feel better, more alive than at any other time when the sun shines. If I'm only fit for the darkness now, Dawn is my own personal moon, drawing life out of me like the tide. Even if I wasn't swallowed whole by love every time I saw her, for everything that she was, the way that she always made me feel better just by entering the room would be enough.

She sits at my feet, to tell me about her school day, while I stroke her hair, and listen to the rise and fall of her voice. It never fails to amaze me how different we are. She was made from me, and yet we are totally new creatures. She's wearing a new necklace, one that I can't identify, but it looks good on her. The beads on it draw out the color of her eyes. I want to compliment her on it, figuring one of the Scoobies must have given it to her when I was gone, but I don't want to interrupt the river of her words. Here, I feel whole. Here, I feel complete, and there's no need to go searching for anything. If Spike makes me real with his pain, Dawn makes me real with her love. Funny how a person could have such different needs, funny how fractured I am. Or maybe not so funny. No laughs at all, really, but I don't think about that, I just sit with my sister and be.

It's Dawn that notices that Willow has left on note for me on the fridge door. Seeing how like a bird Willow was becoming, so frail that I was sure her bones would turn hollow, letting her fly away from all her pain and problems, it didn't occur to me to look anywhere near food. But, no, Dawn's right, there's a letter held by this stupid cow magnet to the door, cryptic but real.

_Buffy,  
Off researching that thing we talked about today. Back later. Don't wait up. And don't worry. It's not magick, it's my trusty laptop and whatever books are left at the Magic Box.  
Willow_

What thing that we talked about? I'm sure she's not researching my sex life with William the Bloody. I'm pretty sure that there are no books about that anywhere. What's left, my startling lack of humanity, the way that he can hurt me now? The way that I let him? Didn't realize Anya stocked psych texts. But no, it must be the humanity thing, it must be trying to figure out what type of creature that I am, that looks human until my eyes come into view and then there is no more hiding. Then there is no more believing any sort of comforting half-truths, because I've looked in the mirror lately and I've seen what I look like. My eyes have all the appearance of a normal human, nothing is slit and nothing is the wrong color, but the depth of them, the age, screams of things that were never meant to be. Some memories cannot be lost, they are burned forever in the brain and can be glimpsed through the eyes, and I am full to bursting of those memories. I have seen death, and I have seen Heaven, and I have come out again and I will never recover from that. That's what can be seen in my eyes, that's what's left of me. No wonder the humanity is gone, no wonder I can't feel anything anymore. I've felt all there is to feel, I've tasted perfection, and I know there is no way to find it on this earth. Nothing will match, can match, the places I've seen. But I'm doomed here anyway, and so spend most of my time looking past people, so that they can never see in me and burn to dust the way that I have. She expects to find a book about that? Good luck with the hunting; I think I'm all alone in the world. There has never been another creature like me. A demon for the good side, dressed in borrowed human skin. I can't be human anymore. I can't be anything.

There's nothing really to do with the house. All those meaningless chores have been done. So I sit with my sister awhile longer, and laugh like a human girl would, and make plans for the weekend, like I think the future is something besides unending torture. She must never know, she can never know. Dawn sees the bruises, but she doesn't understand, only wants to kiss and make them better and I will never take that innocence away from her. She likes Spike, has liked him for longer than I have, but she would never understand the things that we do to each other. For her, everything is simple, everything is clear. She sees he loves me, and so assumes that he cherishes me, like Angel did, like Riley wanted to. The idea that I'm sick of being cherished, of being prized, that I'd rather be down in the dirt than up on a pedestal would only make her sad. Her eyes weren't made for sadness and I've already caused her enough pain.

The rising stars draw me outside like sirens would, the beauty of their voice a deadly compulsion. Death doesn't scare me. I know where I'll go when I die, and I'm not scared. When Spike reminds me of the way all slayers are in love with death, I just laugh now because I know it's true. I've taken death for a lover, take its cold emptiness into me nightly and wrap it around myself to sleep. What is this with Spike, if not a burning passion to die again? He kills me gently, just a touch, just whisper, just a scream, just us together in the night. His eyes are like a glacier, deep and burning with cold when we make love, and sometimes I think he's just as confused as me. We are death to each other, a whispered promise, threats wrapped in caresses. Some nights we go so far into the pain, into the games, into our own little dance, it seems like we couldn't survive the night. But the sun rises on our surprise every morning and we try our lives again. Another day of wondering why we're here at all.

Patrol tonight. Hadn't thought farther than that. There are always new things to kill, another death to chase. Vampires go ashes to ashes and dust to dust then I wipe myself clean and go and kill again. I'm hard all the way through now, burned empty of any passion, except for what I find with Spike. It used to bother me. Now, nothing bothers me. Everything spills out around me, cool and clear, and frozen. There's nothing that could bother me, I'm past all that. Past everything.

I like Sunnydale at night. I like the way the way the street lights look, shining on the sidewalks. I like the sound of the empty air, the way the quiet rolls in like fog. I enjoy listening to my footsteps echo faintly, rat-tat-tat, on the ground when I walk. Even in Southern California, the evening air can feel cool and fresh and we're not so far away that you can't smell the ocean on the breeze, salt with its bitter tang, a strange bite in the wind. I never used to appreciate the night, lived only for the day. But now I see that it has its own beauty, one of shadows, a thousand shades of blue, and midnight rainbows wrapped around the moon, and hidden in lamp glow. If there is ever some way for me to retire, if another is called, and lets me finally rest, I think I'll move some place quiet, with peaceful nights that I can go walking in and never have to fight anything. I would like to just enjoy this time, give myself over to my nocturnal nature. I would like not to kill. I would like the kind of life that other people have. I would like to take things for granted instead of being taken for granted.

There's an answering echo on the sidewalk now, a ghost of sound that almost matches mine, and yet stays off by seconds. No one else would notice, but I'm the Slayer and things like that stand out like trumpets in my hearing. Someone following, getting closer, thinking that they have me fooled. They're the fool, be they human or demon, and soon they'll be dead. Adrenaline races through my veins, clearing the calm out of my mind, rushing over me like a wave. Crashes around me as I come alive again, ready for the fight. Ready for anything.

I spin, my body tensing, muscles strung tight, the itch and fire for a good fight pulling at my skin, crackling in my bones and blood. I want this. I'm ready for this.

It's Spike, smirk in place, hands behind his back, like a general surveying his troops. I used to practice with Giles, spar with him to stay on my toes. Spike is better, this is better, because I know that he'll never pull his blows. Know that it doesn't matter how much he loves me, he'll never fight just for fun, or do anything halfway. The fire still sizzles in my blood, lightening flashes against my eyes; seeing Spike doesn't change any of the things that I feel. Only the way I'll show them. I let my mouth curl into an answering smile, just as dark, just as deadly, and let my fists curl. He's my favorite fight.

"Letting your guard down, Slayer? Letting the baddies get close? How close do you want them?" He steps towards me lightly, on the balls of his feet, ready for action. "What are you thinking tonight?"

I reach out, grab him closer. "I'm thinking I want them off their guard, thinking I'm an easy target," I sweep a foot out, knock his feet out from under him, and he goes down hard. His eyes narrow into slits of ice.

Keep that up, Slayer, and I'll forget to be nice to you.

"Who said that I want you to be nice?" And I pull back to kick at him again. I wanted a fight, and damn it, I will get one. Even with him. Always with him.

He grabs my foot, pulls me off balance. We know each other's moves too well now for any fight to be really fair. The only thing that we have going for each other is the same amount of unfairness, an equal knowledge of how to throw the other one off balance. I go down next to him, just as hard, just as sudden, and now we're on the ground next to each, like we aren't on the middle of Main Street, like a million people might not show up any instant, or a million vampires.

He grins, rash, wicked; the man has no sense. Never has. I have no idea how he lived this long, no idea how he keeps living even the half life that he has now. But his grin calls to me, and I can't stay angry, can't do anything except feel this weird little bubble of joy dance up inside me. It's only with Spike that I want to go on living. It's only with him that I remember that I used to like being who I was, how I was. This is not what anyone would call a love story. I can't even put words to what I feel for him, can't describe what he means to me, but I know he makes me feel things I thought I could never feel again.

Sitting next to each other the cold sidewalk, feeling night's chill seep up through my clothes, till I'm almost as cool as him, all we can do is laugh at each other. No vampires are going to come for us right now; when we laugh, we sound like what we are. Dangerous, and deadly, and looking for a fight. He stands first and, all gentlemen like, reaches down to offer me an unneeded hand to get up. I don't want help when I take his hand, I only want to feel his skin against mine, the start of his seduction. He oh-so-kindly dusts me off, his hands lingering, his eyes heating. I lean against him, breath his scent. Maybe we won't patrol tonight. Maybe the demons can be safe a few more hours. I want him now.

He leans in close, breathes my scent. I'm always fascinated by him when he's like this, always amazed by his actions. There's no mistaking him for human, no thinking he's a mortal man. He's watching the blood beat in my veins, getting turned on by the rich smell of life so close to the surface. He's listening to my heart beat, knowing that if he plays his cards right, he can drink me again tonight. I know just by watching how his eyes move that his skin is tightening with the need to touch me, that he can smell what watching him is doing to me. When he licks his lips, I know that he is already tasting me, all my flavors, in his mind.

But he shakes himself suddenly, and bends down abruptly, picking something off the ground. Eyes suddenly nervous, grin looking a bit sickly, he shows me his new handful.

Flowers. Delicate, white flowers, almost geometric looking, with almost lilac veins running through them. In his rough hands, with their black painted nails, the flowers look almost fragile, like they would break if I breathed on them.

"What are they?" I asked, fascinated. They almost looked like morning glories, but albino. But morning glories die by night, the rules of their existence carefully written into their very cells. I had never seen anything like this that bloomed at night, washed in the glow of the moon.

"Moonflowers," he said proudly. "They only bloom at night," and now he seems almost bashful, a change in mood that leaves me lost, as his moods so often do. "I got em for you. Nicked em from this lady's yard. Thought of you, cause, you know, you bloom at night, too." That last part in a rush, like he can't believe he's saying it, like he doesn't understand what he's doing. Makes two of us, because I am nothing short of confused. We are not a flowers and poetry kind of a couple. I'm not even sure if you could call us a couple. If we were anything to each other but a secret in the night.

"They're beautiful," I whisper. No one had ever brought me flowers. I'm not that kind of woman, the kind that inspires men to acts of gentleness. And certainly not Spike, whose every action with me is outlined in red violence, a thread of danger. Whatever we mean to each, whatever truths we whisper in the night, we are death to the other, and neither of us is capable of forgetting that. There's always the thought that the next night will end on our deaths, that we'll forget everything that we're trying to be to do each other and revert to what we are. Vampire. Slayer. But he's standing in front of me, cupping these flowers in his hand like some kind of a miracle, and I have no idea of what I'm supposed to do now. Always before, we were clear on the rules. We danced only one dance, but I think the beat just changed.

"Why?" I ask, desperate for a reason.

He looks everywhere but at me, and I think I can read anger in the way he holds his body so still while his eyes dance around.

"It's been a month, all right? A month since we brought the house down. If you don't want em, just bloody well say so, all right. Don't leave a vamp standing around, feeling the fool."

Yeah, he's pissed. This I know, even if I don't understand the reasons. I grab the flowers from him, find a way to twist them into my hair, feeling my anger shiver and rise in return. He calls to me like nothing else in this world or the next. Our bodies sing to each other, every emotion, no matter its nature, is echoed in the other, draws the other to new heights. We are always dangerous to each other, in our passion, in our anger. Casual emotions are outside our reach, beyond our understanding. There is only passion, in its million disguises. Even when we fought to kill each other, it was our passion that ruled us.

"Happy?" I snarl, the words twisting out of me like weapons.

"Bleeding ecstatic," and he sounds as close to the edge as I do. There is never solid ground beneath our feet; we are always on an edge with each other. Always fighting to keep our balance, never knowing what direction we'll fall in.

But his eyes soften when he looks at me and I feel something inside in me glow. I shouldn't bother with mirrors; I only see the nightmare I've become. To Spike, I am perfect, walking death, a glorious end, and need blazes in his eyes so quickly. Here, with him, I am beautiful. I am valued. If Willow is any example, my friends won't be able to stand what I've become: I will be disgusting to them, a monster, because they are too innocent to understand that some people crave the dark, need it inside them. But to Spike, I am beautiful. To Spike, I am only myself, nothing monstrous at all. Some nights, I think that I would give up everything just to keep the feeling that Spike shows me. Not unnatural. Not wrong. Not twisted. Perfect in my own dark distinction, wrapped in my invisible demons. Night blooming.


	4. Fall

**The Only Love I Know**

Too much between us to ignore anymore. My blood burns as he looks at me, my body answers his. I don't know how we stayed away from each so long, before we realized the truth. Certainly, nothing has changed in how we deal with each other. He has always called to me; I just used to be better at ignoring it. There were other things in my life, I could pretend that I didn't see that look in his eyes when he watched me, and he could pretend not to see what was in my eyes. But we've both lost everything now, leaving only each other and lives that we don't have the faintest hope of understanding. I move towards him like I'm in a dream, slow, sure, hypnotized by the light in his eyes, caught by his spell. He reaches out for me, pulls me against him hard, so that I can feel the strength of him. There's something almost irresistible about the fact that he is as as strong as me. Humans are so weak, so fragile. I had to be so careful with Riley. With Spike, I can be myself, safe in the knowledge that he won't break, and that he won't look at me in the morning and wonder what I am, that I want these things.

He tastes like blood when I kiss him, and I can feel fangs against my lips, a gentle nick, almost an accident. He can't hold his demon all the way back when we're together. Prey and passion mixed into one, too hard a combination to resist. Blood lust mixes too easily with lust, and we both get lost too fast for him to hold back. He licks at the drops of blood he's drawn, and I whisper his name, pulling him harder against me. At the back of my mind, I know that I have responsibilities I should be fulfilling- we haven't patrolled, god only knows what's out there in the night, getting away with murder because we're so wrapped up in each other. But most of me doesn't care, wants only to be here, in this moment, caught in his arms. I move closer, my body arching in invitation, my head thrown back so he can lick at my neck. I don't even care that we're in public. I need him now, will die if I don't get him, and he's hard enough against me that I know he feels the same.

"Hey, guys!" A voice says with forced brightness and Spike and I break apart like we've been burned. I can't look at him, not even to see if he's managed to pull the demon back in. I have to fight the urge to run my tongue around my lips, to make sure that Spike caught all the drops, that I'm not standing here, looking bloody and debauched. I can't move at all; I'm frozen by shock.

Because it's Willow standing there, trying to look okay with everything, trying to look like Spike and I wouldn't have just done it on the ground if she hadn't interrupted us. There's a sick glaze to her eyes, but I can only recognize it because I've known her for so long. Spike probably doesn't see it at all. But he's frozen still too, no doubt trying to figure out if Willow's going to stake him for this.

"Red," he says, guardedly, carefully, stepping back from like I carry the plague.

"Spike," she says back, eyes wide. So maybe I do still have blood on my lips, or maybe Spike is the one looking bloody. Hard to say.

"Will," I say, aiming for casual. What does she think that she's doing here, with us? She made her feelings more than clear this morning. She thinks that this is wrong, that it's sick and twisted. Why on earth would she want a close up performance? Why would she come in the dark and watch us? Never figured Willow for a voyeur, and she sure doesn't look like she got off any watching us.

She speaks, still in that bright, unnatural tone, the one that I can tell hides darker, more real emotions- I think she would happily kill Spike right now, if she didn't think it would lose her me forever. "Saw you guys together, thought I would patrol with you."

I eye her warily, "You want to come with us?"

Bad phrase, I can almost hear Spike trying not to laugh aloud, considering what we were about to do before she interrupted us. "You thinking threesome, Red? Didn't think the Slayer here was your type."

I turn to glare at him, trying to keep my own mirth down. Willow wouldn't understand, couldn't understand, all the ways I've changed. It hurts too much to see her look away when she's confronted with all the things that I am now. It's just easier to lie. It hurts less. "Spike, don't be disgusting."

"C'mon, Pet," he croons, laughter still hiding his voice, "cat's well out of the bag now, might as well be myself."

Willow tries to laugh that off, and I suddenly want to be anywhere but here, with the two of them. There's a wrongness to everything and I think that I could cheerfully hate Willow forever if she's ruined the only thing that makes me real nowadays. Spike doesn't care if he alienates her. He's made his feelings on the Scoobies quite clear, is explicate in explaining why it is I'm better off without them. Together, Spike and Willow feel like dynamite that's about to go off. It doesn't feel safe to be around them. I wish I could run and run away from all this. I'm getting better at running and it's getting easier and easier to stay away. Willow is still pretending that she didn't see what she most certainly did, and Spike is looking growly, that look of frustration that any male would get if they were interrupted where we were interrupted.

"So, patrol?" If I can't have Spike, then might as well go and do what I was made to do. There must be vampires out there somewhere that need killing. No big bad has really shown itself lately, but that doesn't mean there aren't little bads out there, running around with big, glaring death wishes flashing over their heads.

None of us might be on good terms with the others, but that doesn't mean that we've forgotten how to act in Sunnydale after dark. Willow and Spike let me take the lead, and fan out behind me. I'm super sensitive these days, so it seems to me that I can almost feel Willow's eyes on the flowers that Spike gave me. I'm suddenly glad that he did. Maybe she'll be less inclined to dust him if she sees that it's not all bruises and blood between us.

There's no conversation; what would we say? All it takes is a glance at Spike to know what he's thinking as he walks behind me. He wishes Willow wasn't here, he wants to finish what he started. And Willow is almost as easy. She wishes Spike had never been here, she's wishing he would go, and leave me alone, like that being alone would be enough to make me whole again. When did her world get so narrow, that she can't see anything but what she thinks should be there? When did she get naive? It's not Spike's fault that I am the way I am. It's just that he's the only one who can make me not care about the thousand and one ways that I've changed, about all the emptiness I have now, in what used to be a life.

More of our bad luck, there's nothing to kill tonight. No vampires, no demons, just a rising tension between us, growing steadily as the night slowly wanes into the early morning. This isn't the way that it's supposed to be, not at all. I can be with Willow, even if what we had now is a poor shadow of what used to be between us, sharp with thorns and painful to the touch, or I can be with Spike, lost in the moment, only feeling, lost to thought. But I can't handle the two of them together, all their suspicions, no trust anywhere, just fear and anger. The silence feels palpable, like a cat scratching at my back, like fingers digging into my flesh. It's driving me crazy. I have so little control over myself these days, so little strength when it comes to stopping what I'm feeling. Anger is like fire under my skin, a force larger than myself, struggling to get out. It burns, painful under my flesh, a demon pushing out of me, until it pushes me to snap.

"Willow! There's nothing here. Go home. Just go home." Just my luck, I think there's more in my voice than I wanted her to hear. I think there's pain, I think there's anguish, but I can't stop everything from bleeding out in my words. Spike watches me, his eyes hidden from Willow. He knows this mood well, recognizes what he sees in me know and knows as well as I do that Willow needs to go and go now, if she doesn't want to see anything else that's she's not ready for. Like she's ready for anything. Like she can deal with anything.

And does the woman listen to me? No, of course not. That would mean she might care about what I want, what I feel, what I need. Instead she touches me gentle, and I can feel the demon inside me shriek and wrestle for control. It wants whatever it can have. This night has been too hard. No release with Spike, and then all the awkward moments with him and Willow, and finally, nothing to kill. I can't control myself, whatever I am now is too young to understand how it is when humans are mad, how it's supposed to handle itself. Her hands are gentle on me, but I can't take gentleness, I can't pay it back in kind. I grit my teeth against the need to hurt her- _your fault, your fault, this is your fault, fucking bitch!_- and try to push her hand off me gently. My voice is a whisper because if I try to speak, I will only yell. I know what she wants, she wants to fix things between us, but now is not the time, can't she see that? Can't she see how I'm fighting this, how hard it is to control? And now even Spike moves closer; he knows that Willow is doing the wrong thing. Knows that no matter how anger I am, I would never really be able to forgive myself if I gave in to what I'm feeling and hurt her like she's hurt me. Willow will never understand what he's doing, will never understand that he's trying to protect her from me, from the rage that eats me alive, destroys me. She'll only interpret his actions as threat, never seeing that I'm the real danger.

Her voice is hesitant when she speaks. She knows that something is wrong, but lacks the understanding to know what, exactly, it is. "Aren't you coming home, Buffy? I thought," a glance at Spike, than her eyes are back on me. Damn it, why now, of all times, is she trying to be understanding? Why is she always so far off the mark? "We could talk about things."

Even when she's trying this hard, her voice grates on my ears like sandpaper, scraping my anger up another notch. _Stop it stop it stop it stop it!_ I spin away, knowing full well that the truth of my new nature is in my eyes, and I can't stand the thought that she might see me for what I really am. "Just go, Willow! You need to go! Now is not the time." I'm fighting for control with everything I have and I'm losing. I want to hurt her. I want to make her feel what's she made me feel.

Spike is not totally clueless. He may be as angry at Willow as I am, but he knows that letting that feeling loose won't solve anything. He gently pries her hand of my arms, turns Willow away from us.

"I'll walk her home before dawn, Red. You'll talk to her then." His voice is firm, and it's clear that he'll accept no arguments. Finally, thank god, finally, she turns away, confused, concerned, but seeing that there is no way that I'm going anywhere right now, no way that Spike will leave me alone. She may hate what we are to each other, but it seems to at least be coming clear to her that it's not the best idea to get between us.

"All right then. I, um, I'll see you at home, Buffy." She starts to walk away and even that little bit of distance helps pull me down from my killing rage. But she stops, she stops like she's blind, and she speaks again. "Spike?"

A grunt from him. It's no easier on him, being between her and me when he can see very well how fast I'm sinking into the darkness. He doesn't want to come between us in any way.

"Spike, don't hurt her." Willow's words are a whispered plea. She doesn't know what she's asking.

I can feel his eyes on me as she speaks; can feel him assess exactly what I'll need to feel human again, to become what I used to be. His voice is quiet when he speaks, full of knowledge that he has no desire to share with her. Some truths go too deep to ever speak them aloud. "It's never pain, Willow. Get on home."

I think she runs but I'm too lost in myself to know for sure. Fire in my blood, fire in my bones, nothing to kill nothing to hunt and the fire burns me alive he took my kill away he took my kill away...

"Buffy." His voice is firm and he spins me around to look at him. He's so strong, he can take anything that I give and stay standing. Willow would be cold and still at my feet, but Spike is already dead and a second death is not so easy.

We're by the cemetery, at the edge of town now, and he pulls me off the walk into the darkness, even as I fight him. God, it feels so good to fight, feels so good to let the demon rage free again.

"Fight me," Buffy, he says, and hits me hard in the face, enough to free the demon.

I fly at him, punching and kicking and he gives as good as he gets back. He can meet my demon with his own; he can battle it on equal ground. It's such a relief to just let go, to let myself be what I am in the dark, in the night. His hands are hard on me when he finally gets me, and I'm no gentler on him.

He smells so good, like smoke, like blood, like death, and this close to him, one lust is lost in another and all our anger burns away, changes into something else. When we kiss, it draws fresh blood for Spike to drink, and when he runs his hands down me, I battle them away so that I can touch him. His body is like marble, a carved beauty that feels like living ice beneath my hands. I wonder what I feel like to him, but he's past words now, only whispers my name as he licks and bites, a heart beat away from eating me alive.

When he's finally in me, I can feel the rest of my demons fly away from me, leaving me in peace, leaving me calm. Now we can be gentle, now we can be kind, and he rocks me to ecstasy, and we scream together.

He holds me tight when we're done, holds me against him and I finally feel weak and sated and human. The rage is gone, leaving only Buffy behind. This is what Willow would never understand, that I need this violence from and with Spike, so that I don't turn it on anyone else. That I don't hurt the people that I used to love. Instead, I just hurt him, and he hurts me, and we both can be calm again. I can rest in his arms, tired and safe, because I know that I can't kill him without really trying, that he can take whatever I give and just get off on it.

"Better, love?" he whispers, playing with the flowers in my hair, tangling his fingers through my curls.

I lean into his touch, the coolness of his skin against my heat.

"Yeah. It was bad tonight."

"I know. I could see."

"Do you think she could?"

"Nah, doubt it. Like you said, she only sees what she wants to."

A pause then as I wonder if I have the energy to go again. Spike's body is an unending fascination to me, addictive, a constant temptation.

"Pet," he says, finally. "Can't believe I'm saying this, cause she's damn fool, and not one of 'em deserve you, but she's trying. Can you give her that, that' she's trying?"

I turn in his arms, face his sculpted face. Spike may say that Drusilla chose him for his poetry, but I think it was the face she wanted, elegant and vicious all at once. A predator's face. I don't know how he hid it even from himself in his human times. "Why do you care what she does?"

"Cause you do. I saw your face tonight, Slayer. I saw what was eating at you. You didn't want to hurt her. You would have hurt yourself before you hurt her. No matter how angry you are at her, you still care."

"You think I'm stupid for that?" I don't try to deny the words. There are bloody half moons in my palms, carved there from my efforts to keep my hands from acting without my permission. I can't hurt her. It would be the last breath of my humanity. As if he can read my mind, he takes one of my hands, turns it palm up and gently licks the blood off, so used to my taste now that the kick of a slayer's blood to his system barely makes him shudder. When he answers me, his words are almost lost against my skin, drowned in my blood.

"Nah, darling, I'm a master at caring for people I shouldn't. Love you, don't I?"

"Not now, Spike." I can't handle these declarations. I know and I try to deal with it, but there is nothing in me anymore that would let me love anything. He knows that now, and mostly leaves the words unspoken, but I can always feel them between us. Why can't it just be flesh? Why can't it just be need?

"Have it your way then. But talk to the woman, if only so she doesn't kill me."

"In the morning. I'll talk to her in the morning. For now, take me home."

He bites my ear, gently, just the faintest skim of teeth on skin. "Done already, love? We've only gone once."

"Not my home. Yours. Take me the crypt."


	5. Reach

**The Only Love I Know**

_And here is the dawn,  
(Until death do us part);  
And here is your death,  
In your daughter's heart._

-Leonard Cohen "Here It Is"

"Slayer? C'mon, pet, wake up, I promised the witch I would see you home and I don't want her coming after me. She's a little too off these days, know what I mean?"

I roll over to see his face, pale in the darkness, all harsh lines and sudden shadows. We both made promises, I know. But I finally feel quiet now, at rest, and this feeling is too rare, too fleeting, for me to want to give it up easily. It's the dark of new twilight in Spike's crypt, quiet as death long past. I can only see him in shadow, washed in all the blues of the faded sun. The dream whispers through me, of what Spike would look like in the sun, of what its beams would look like, bright and unforgiving, against all that pale, sculpted flesh. I have only the briefest memory of what he looked like when the day wouldn't kill him- we were too wrapped up in trying to find death for the other. We didn't know then all the things that we would be to each other, didn't see what we had fought so hard to hide from ourselves. I don't know when our hate turned to whatever it is that we have now. I don't know if it was ever hate, don't know if there are words for what this is now.

"Don't want to go." With Spike, I can be young again. A child, petulant and demanding and as bad as I am, he only laughs. This is how we were meant to be together.

He stands up, giving me a moment to admire his body, the sleek lines, the hard muscles, the healing scratches, then reaches down to give me his hand, and hauls me out of bed, back into the cold, empty world.

"Let's go. Get your clothes on."

"Thought you liked me better this way."

"Goldilocks, there's no way that I don't like you. But I don't fancy dying tonight, so I better get you back to the home front. The witch is waiting on you, you know she is."

"What am I going to say?" What is there to say?

"Why do you want to explain anything to her? What business of hers is it, what you and I do when we're all alone? C'mon, never pegged you for being yellow."

I don't know when it was that the living turned to ghosts and that Spike and I, old hands at death, became the only real things in it. I watch all my friends, and I remember the love I had for them like I'm watching it through a window. It's so clear, so vivid, but when I reach out and try to touch it, there's something cold and hard in the way. I'm not part of them anymore; I'm not part of anything. I try and try, and each day, I feel it slip farther and farther away from me. But Spike is watching me as I sit on his bed and do nothing, and I can tell by the look in his eyes that he's going to drag me home whether or not I want to go, that for some reason it actually matters to him that I have this talk with Willow. Me, I think I would rather face Glory again, a thousand Glories. Willow has seen the truth now- I doubt anything like Spike and I could seem real to her when it was all just words, but now she's seen it and I don't think I could take it if she tries to take away the only thing that I have left.

"Why do you want me to do this?"

"You're stalling. C'mon, I don't wanna incinerate on the way back to your place."

"Why are you playing the gentleman, anyway?" I ask sullenly, dragging my clothes off the floor, doing anything I can think of to delay.

"Maybe it's the pleasure of your company," he shoots back sarcastically, and I shrug. Murmuring sweet nothings has never really been our style. We've always made each other bleed; the only thing that's changed is the nature of the blood.

His eyes are on me as I get dressed, hot and a little wild, and I drag it out slowly, a reverse strip tease. He's so easy to drive crazy, so easy to make mine.

We're silent as we walk back to the house in the dying night. I'm so used to the night now, so used the many shades of shadow that make up Sunnydale when the stars come out, that I think I can almost feel the sun waiting on the horizon, straining to rise. No wonder there are so many myths about where the sun goes after it sets. The darkness feels so complete, so real, that it's easy to see how people might think the light would never come back. People say that midnight is the witching hour, but the ones who say that have never been out at four a.m., when there's nothing in the air but silence, when I can hear Spike's and my footsteps for miles. We could be the only two creatures on the planet.

He leaves me at the steps to the house that used to be my home, before my mother died, before I died, before I came back and found everything changed. Before I changed, a change deeper and darker than anything that any of us could have imagined. He leaves without a word, and I watch him go, just as silent. I don't know what Willow is planning on telling me, but I know she is still up, still and quiet in the light trapped behind the closed doors between us, but I know that I am not what I was. As Spike disappears into the deeper darkness, as my body comes to the abrupt realization that he is no longer here with me, I know that whatever it is I've changed into has more to do with him than whatever waits for me in the safety of my house. But my memories are still clear to me, even if my humanity is just a dim echo in my blood, and the woman who is trying so hard not to look out the window at us was once my best friend. She wants to be again, has been trying in her own way, and enough of me is lonely that I turn away from the man that has become the only real thing in my unlife and let myself into the house.

She's sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, looking for all the world like a child. When did I get so old, that everything looks young to me now?

Willow smiles awkwardly when she sees me, and I can see in her face that she's having a hard time putting the thought of Spike and I together out of her mind. But she pats the piece of couch closest to her, and looks at me hopefully and she's trying so hard that I know that I need to as well.

"You, um..." she's fixated on the flowers, staring at them like she didn't see them in my hair hours ago, "you have a good time?" She winces as she says the last, but she's not sick and she's not screaming and I think that may be the best that I'm going to get here, so I nod quietly. She doesn't want details, and I don't want to share any, so we're all good there. "Any occasion?" she finally asks, and I touch the flower again, remembering the defensiveness in Spike's voice as he gave them to me. They're dying with the night, dying like him, dying like me. We're none of us made for the sun.

"Month."

She swallows hard. "Gee, a boyfriend who remembers anniversaries." Damn, she's trying. She's trying so hard that it hurts me to look at her, to hear her. She hates this; she hates every part of it. She hates that he marks me, she hates that he does me, she hates that I went with him and not her when we broke up the patrol, and she' still sitting here trying to be okay with everything. Maybe there is a chance here, maybe there is something left between us to build a bridge over all the ways that we've hurt each other since I died. She was there when Angel left. She was there the first time I died. She stood next to me at my mother's funeral. There are lives and lives and lives between us, a thousand times when we've saved each other.

Deep inside me, in a part of myself that I can barely feel anymore, a part that I forget is real, I feel something break apart, fill with pain.

"Wouldn't say boyfriend. We're not that friendly and he's not so much of a boy." I try to say it so that it's not hurtful, but there are no easy words for Spike and I, and it's not in me to let her forget that. I don't know I feel so driven to say these things, don't know why I just can't take the easy escape that she offers me.

Maybe I just don't understand kindness anymore. Maybe being nice is a trait only humans have. Maybe I'm a bitch. Looking at her, I almost feel like two people, mirrors of each other, both trying to punch out of my skin. I loved this woman, and yet, now, when I look at her, everything is outlined in pain, and it's so hard not to lash back with everything I feel. When I first came back, when I looked at Sunnydale in flames, when I heard the bikes roar and saw myself being torn apart by demons, I thought I was in hell. I still do. I don't know what Sunnydale was meant to be, but the Hellmouth has finally claimed its first living victim. The rest of this town may live in a comfortable state of denial, but I am forever wrapped in the fires of hell.

"Yeah, well..." Willow's voice trails off. Polite chitchat done now, I guess. Maybe we can get to something real. "I, um... I think I found something today. In some of the books in the Magick Box."

"Yeah?" What I am supposed to say? When she practices magick, she's scary as all hell, and when she researches, I keep remembering all the dark places that too much knowledge took her in the first place. Wouldn't it be ironic if all this were not her fault but mine? If I had never come here, if Willow had never met me, she'd probably be at MIT or Caltech or something right now. She wouldn't be so wrapped in pain that it looks like it's eating her alive.

"Yeah, it's about the spell..."

"The one you did to bring me back?" No way to say that nice. The best I can hope for is dispassionate.

"No, actually. Um, the ones the monks did. The spell they did to make Dawn."

I can feel an eyebrow quirk up. Too much time spent with Spike. "That spell's written down anywhere?"

"Well, not exactly, but some that look real similar. And see, how they do the memories, how they make the form... how they make things real…" There's something in her voice that I can't identify, an eagerness mixed with worry. She's tripping over her own words and she hasn't done that since before we left high school.

"C'mon, Willow, what are you trying to say?"

"It wasn't me," she said finally. "It wasn't my spell that changed you. It wasn't bringing you back from the dead that made you into... whatever you are. It was the monks. To make Dawn real... they gave her part of your soul."


	6. Slip

**The Only Love I Know**

Silence can almost become a living thing. If it goes on long enough, it almost seems to breath, to move and catch everything around it in it's own strange half-life. I can feel it, cool and searching, resting against my skin, heavy with questions. I could feel it pressing against her, waiting to engulf me, to make me into itself. Heavy like cotton, thick with need, it wrapped around me, wanting to take me, to empty me of all thought, of all reason. With effort, I pushed the idea off of me. Human, I was human, and humans didn't do these things, didn't respond to things as I was doing right now. Willow had said something, and whether or not she was correct, it was an idea that needed to be talked about. I could talk. I had always been able to talk.

Willow was watching me carefully, apparently uncomfortable with saying anything. I didn't feel up to meeting her eyes. Willow had seen me with Spike last night, had seen me as I really was now, and I didn't want to take the chance of finding out for sure if Willow was afraid of me now. The other woman stayed quiet, waiting for my response, waiting to find out how I would react to this news. When I could finally find any words in myself, when I finally felt like I wasn't being strangled with silence, I managed to force a single, rusty word out of my throat. "What?"

Willow looked uncomfortable now. "The monks. They needed to make sure that you would love Dawn, that you would care for her like one of your own. So they took part of your soul. That's why..."

"Why what?"

"Why you knew you were sisters, even after I did the forgetting spell. Because you match. It's not just the DNA, it's not just the flesh and blood and bone of you that they made Dawn out of. They made her out of everything. She is you."

I shook her head. Ideas were crashing down on me, threatening to bury everything I thought that I knew.

"But she doesn't look like me." That, at least, I understood.

"You're not clones. This is magick, not science. But she is you."

"That means...that Spike could hurt her, too. That he always could." The thought was troubling, more than troubling. Even when I had trusted him for nothing else, I had always known that he cared for Dawn, that he would protect her above all things. It was the first thing that I had truly liked about him, the only thing that I could admire without it reflecting back on me in some way. Spike liked Dawn. Spike would protect her. I had gone to my death secure in that knowledge. This, this changed everything.

"He never has. I don't pretend to understand him, but I do think he really cares for Dawn. The Goddess knows that we had all been counting on that when... when you were gone. Maybe he sees you in her."

"Or her in me," was my restless response. I turned her eyes out the window, back to to the night that I had lost Spike in. The night I had lost myself in. Always this way… If Dawn was the reason I had changed, the reason I was so wrong now, there was no going back, no fixing anything. If Willow was right, I had been this way for much longer than I had ever thought possible.

But Willow couldn't be right. I hadn't felt like this last year. I felt so cold now, so empty that I thought it would be easier to die again than to ever find a way to make myself feel complete again. I would remember that, those feelings, the aching distance from everything that used to be so close. I would know... I would know.

But like it or not, thoughts were crowding up on me now, memories that I had thought I had lost with death. The way I had felt so cold and so hard last year, the way that Riley hadn't been able to see that I cared, even when I tried her hardest to show him how I felt. I had thought it was losing Mom, I had thought it was losing Angel. I had never thought that it was losing myself. Could Willow possibly be right?

"Buffy? You still in there?" Willow's voice, sounding like she was somewhere else, somewhere where the world was right, where people were people and nothing ever went wrong. Willow's voice, sounding as far away from me as possible. If Willow was right, then nothing would ever truly be right in my world again. The distance that had been growing between me and the others would continue as it had been. Nothing would ever change.

"You're wrong," I whispered, still staring into the twilight hues of the approaching dawn. "You have to be wrong. It has to be you. 'Cause I can feel how different I am, I can feel how I changed..." I didn't care if my words hurt Willow. Willow deserved to be hurt. Her, it had to be her. I had to be mad at someone I could touch, someone I could hurt. The monks were all beyond me now- they had fallen to Glory first, and there was nothing left to find of them. There had to be somebody left I could blame for all of this.

"I don't think..." Willow's voice was soft, concerned, maybe even worried. "I don't think that you've changed as much as you think you have."

"Bullshit! You saw me tonight; you saw what I am now. You heard what Spike said. You saw... how it is between us... you saw... I don't- I'm not- I'm different."

There weren't even words to describe what I was now. I could feel the anger under my skin all the time, like a living thing, fighting me for control. The anger, the pain, was everything, consumed everything.

Everywhere I looked, everything I did; it was all tainted by this pain that would never leave me. Humanity was lost to me, had to be lost to me. Nothing human ever felt this. It couldn't feel this way. I was alone, more alone than I had ever been.

I couldn't face Willow, couldn't stand to see whatever emotions might be in the other woman's face. The cuts in my palms still throbbed, a constant reminder of just how hard it was to keep myself under control. Even remembering the love I had once had for Willow, even wanting everything to go back to the way that it was, it had been all I could do not to turn on the witch, not to try to make someone else feel the pain that I was in. Spike had assured me that Willow hadn't seen what I was now, couldn't see what I was now, but I wasn't as sure. I had lost touch with my own emotions, couldn't recall how exactly things were supposed to feel, or what names those feelings ought to have, but I thought that this vague, sick sense of dread that kept me looking out the window even as Willow watched me and tried to make things better between us

might be shame. I should have stayed dead. It would have been easier on everybody.

I could feel Willow's weight on the couch shift, imagined that I could see Willow thinking about reaching out again, thinking about touching me, thinking about trying to be everything we used to be to each other. But there was too much between us now, too many lies, too many betrayals, and I wasn't surprised when O felt the weight shift again as Willow pulled back, deciding not to risk anymore touches. Maybe she wasn't as stupid as she was starting to act.

Without turning, without moving at all, I asked again. "Are you sure?"

Willow's voice when she answered was etched with sadness. "As sure as I can be. Buffy, it's the only explanation I can find."

There was nothing that I felt that I could say to sure. As curses went, this one was pretty much a kicker. The only thing keeping me from being human was also the only thing that made me feel human. Not for the first time, I sourly reflected that the monks had had a lousy sense of humor.

Willow had also fallen silent. Apparently, after that last line, there was nothing left for either of them to say to each other. Maybe ever. Maybe this was the end of all their conversations. Maybe there was only a finite number of words between two people, maybe everything was coming to end. After a moment of quiet so long that I fully expected Willow to just get up and leave, to end yet another conversation she didn't want to have, the witch spoke again, only a whisper, but even that was something.

"Buffy..."

It was enough.

I stared out the window, refusing to turn, refusing to move. But some part of me wanted things the way that they used to be, wanted the past, wanted to feel close again to something real and living. My voice cold, drained of all emotion, I began to talk to Willow, to tell her what it was really like to be alive again when I had thought that I had gone to her final rest, that I had finally finished all that I had been put on this earth to do. I talked about the red anger that lived inside of me all the time now, the way it had been there since I came back, the way it warped everything, so that the world around me seemed as solid and as real as a fun house mirror, nothing to be trusted, nothing to believed. I talked about how the rage lived inside me like a monster, how there were times that I couldn't even stand to touch myself, I was so angry at what it was that I had become. I talked about how empty I felt, how there was nothing left for me anymore. I had done what I was meant to. I had saved the world. What was left, what could be better than that? Everything I did now was wasted action, wasted breath. It should be Faith now, making the world a safer place. I had had my glorious death. I had sacrificed myself and it was all for nothing. I talked about how it felt to lose more and more of myself everyday, to be trapped by something that I couldn't understand and had no hope in fighting.

I talked about what it felt like to be with Spike, how being with him calmed the anger, directed it, focused it. How with him I could be real because he accepted everything without prejudice. He wanted nothing that I couldn't give; he wanted nothing but me. He had no expectations, every moment they had together was a gift, more than he had ever thought possible. It was soothing, to be around someone who could never think poorly of you, never think that you may not be doing things right. Even when I turned on him, even when I lashed out at him, made him hurt, made him bleed, he smiled at it and took me into his arms again. Pain was nothing to him and anger was just another aspect of love. It helped that he had been in love with a madwoman for over a century. There was nothing about me that could shock him, nothing that could make him look down on me. I talked about what it was like when he hurt me, how much of a relief it was that anything could still hurt me, that I could still feel pain and with it, pleasure. I talked about how being with Spike made me forget how frozen I was inside, how lost and how destroyed. I talked about he way he made me feel alive again, made me feel like something beyond a living body wrapped around a rotting heart, a zombie come to earth, walking around for the pleasure of my master. I told Willow how Spike made all the cold go up in flames, how it was to be with him, unthinking, only feeling, only pleasure and pain.

Finally I talked about what it felt like to be with Dawn, how it was only my younger sister, only the girl that Willow had almost killed, that made me feel whole and complete. How there was no anger in me at Dawn, because none of this had been her fault. The last true innocent, that was Dawn. I talked until I could hear my own voice going hoarse. I talked until there were no words left between us.

Through the torrent of speech, washing away the silence like a flood, Willow sat still and said nothing and I was fine with that, comfortable even. There was no room for Willow's pain inside of my own. It was nothing, not even worthy of the name. What was there in me to comfort Willow when I couldn't even comfort myself? There were no soft and gentle lies to tell here, no way to gentle the awful and terrible truth. Willow's spell or the monks, I was a demon now, with a demons' heart and a demon's ways. I couldn't comfort anything. I couldn't even help herself.

Even as I ran silent, when there was nothing left to be spoken, when every truth had been told, Willow sat silent. Maybe it wasn't really disgust. Maybe it wasn't really horror. Maybe it just took a long time to take everything in, to understand everything that I had just said. Maybe the Hellmouth would become a popular tourist attraction. I could see the first red streaks of sunrise on the horizon, like blood washing through the clouds. Everything was blood now; everything was death. And there was no hope of making things right with Willow, because whatever the other girl may have felt before, it was gone now, drowned in the flood of my confessions. There was nothing left for Willow to be friends with; whatever Willow had brought out of the grave, had brought to save Sunnydale and damn herself, it was not me. Willow would have forgiven the old me, the human me. She would have still loved her.

It came as no surprise when Willow left without saying a word. Nothing was a surprise anymore. You needed to be able to feel to care when the woman you had called your best friend for years walked out on you without even saying she loved you. Without even saying she was sorry. Feeling like every word I had said was resting on my shoulders like stones, like souls with no home and no hope of rest, I got up from the couch and wearily made me way to the bedroom. Maybe this would be as good as it got, maybe the only things left to say were my confessions, and once said, all language had dried like the desert between us. Why had I ever left Spike this night? Why did I ever bother come to this place at all, this place that used to be home?

My bed was empty and cool, strangely soft and unfamiliar after Spike's crypt. I lay in bed like a corpse laid out for the funeral. Sleep began the hardest time, my body remembering what it felt like to die, to be dead, and fighting to be again. No matter what my heart thought, no matter that some days I felt like I could almost grow accustomed to living again, my body always yearned for the grave, always fought to get back to its last moment of peace. It wasn't ever satisfied with the ecstasy I fed it like a drug, the passion that only Spike could give. The first few moments of sleep brought something akin to terror but closer to hope to me, the mix changing with the day. Maybe this time I wouldn't wake up. Maybe this time I would get my wish, my curse, and die again, die for real, in some way that I could never come back from. My next death, I wanted them to burn the body and scatter the ashes.

Sleep was hovering over me like a mist, cool and opaque, when I heard the door to her room open. No matter what else I had become, I was a slayer first and that was all it took to bring me back ready for the fight. Minutes out of the grave, I had fought. This would be no different. Jerking up, my eyes scanned for whatever it was that had come here ready to die.

It was Willow. "I m sorry," she stammered, scared, unsure. "Were you asleep? I didn't want to..."

With an effort that became harder every day, I managed to control myself, managed to push down the desire to kill that rose in me like a fever. "Still up. Obviously." Her voice was unsteady. Spike had been right when he had said that I didn't want to hurt Willow. Must be some kind of sickness, that I kept staying my hand. Or maybe just the memory of what we used to be to each other. Memory was a powerful thing.

"Did you want something?"

"I thought that maybe, maybe you wouldn't understand earlier. Why I left."

I felt my face grow hard and still. I struggled against the urge to turn away from Willow, or to show any of my hurt on my face. "Not my business, what you do."

"It is. Buffy... I didn't understand how it was for you, how it is. What I did."

"You said how I changed was the monks' fault."

Willow carefully sat on the edge of the bed, trying to be both close and far at the same time. "Losing part of your soul, changing into something not quite human, that was the monks. But... sentencing you to this... this life. That was all my fault."

"Yes." I agreed. Words were only words, symbols for thought. Words were nothing. I wanted Willow to bleed for her.

It was the last word that did Willow in, that caused her face to crumble, her strength to pour out of her in a wave. One moment I was sitting, trying to be strong, the next she was flat on Buffy's bed sobbing as if her heart were breaking. It softened something inside me, to see her that way, to see that I wasn't the only one who hurt. But not enough, never enough, to quiet the demons that lived inside my blood now.

On the bed, Willow was still crying, her words muffled by the blankets, by her sobs. Watching her, I was struck again at how the masks of humanity concealed predators beneath the flesh. With my soul torn in two, I had lost those soft edges, those places to hide from the reality of myself. Watching Willow cry, it was a fight to ignore that part of myself that whispered that Willow was the enemy and the enemy was on her own now, was weak and could be destroyed. I was not here to kill humans, I knew that, it was only my genes that were confused, only my instincts. What was that the First Slayer had said? No friends. Only the kill. She had probably killed humans; she had probably killed anything that crossed her. That was my lineage, that was my heritage, and that was my constant fight. Did the monks know what they were doing, when they stole away the only thing that made me human? Did they know what I was? Did they know what they did to me? Did they curse me on purpose? Did they damn me to this sure in the knowledge of what they were doing? Or was this an accident, the natural side effect of saving the world?

With effort, I pushed away the thought of Willow's vulnerability and instead tried desperately to listen to her words, the things she was saying. Tears were not that far off from blood, a cleansing of a sort. And Willow was not anything that I was supposed to kill. Willow was human. Willow was a friend.

"I'm sorry, Buffy, I'm sorry. It was selfish, I know it was, I didn't think, I just... I missed you Buffy. I loved you and you were gone and I could fix it so I did. I never meant to hurt you, I never meant to put you in this kind of pain. I just wanted my friend back. I wanted everything back. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." her words trailed off into incoherency, into sound without meaning, words like a running stream of water over all the hurt and pain of the last few months.

Through it all, I sat very still, only my eyes moving. This one hurt, Willow hurt. Willow was crying, was trying. Moving like a statue come to life, like something frozen by time and pain and only just coming to life again, I reached a hand out and touched Willow's hair, short now, a paler red, one of the thousand ways that Willow had changed since they first met all those years. Willow stilled as she felt my hand and rolled, turning her face, tear marked, stained by grief, up to me.

"Do you hate me now? Do you want to kill me?" The words were without emotion and I realized for the time that Willow knew exactly how I had changed, had seen it all, it was only that she didn't know what to do. Just like I didn't know what to do.

"I don't... I don't to hurt you, Willow. No matter what it looked like, looks like. I just... I can't control anything anymore. Can't control myself. I think Spike's right, I think I did come back wrong."

Willow slowly sat up, pushing her hair back from her face, and reached for a shaky level of control, of confidence. "It wasn't the spell. I mean, it was and it wasn't. It's the spell's fault, and my fault, and it's kinda the monks' fault, but it's not the spell exactly."

"How do you mean?"

"I think..." and here Willow struggled again for the right thing to say, the only thing to say. "I think that you're really mad at me. At everyone. And you're right to be. We did the wrong thing. We were wrong and we hurt you. And that's why things are so hard now, why everything is hard now. Cause you didn't want to mad at us, but you are, but you don't wanna be, so you push all that away and it comes crowding up... and we're not so hot at this stuff, are we? The emotional stuff?"

I choked out a laugh at the last. Yeah, we sucked. Confession night at the Summers' place, free redemption for all. Maybe Willow had a point with that anger stuff. Maybe, with my soul gone, everything was just that much harder to control, maybe everything felt inhuman. Maybe I was inhuman.

"And my soul?" I finally asked. That seemed to be the kicker, the thing that screwed everything else up, the thing that made everything else so hard and painful.

"Dawn's," whispered Willow, sounding like there was anything else in the world now that she would rather tell me, knowing as she must that it was a sentence of living death, that I would never be human again and without that humanity, maybe never really in control again. "You might get it back when she dies..."

"Which will be long after I do!" I snarled. "Everything I have done in the last year has been for her. I'm not throwing that away. She's mine to protect."

"Then this is it, Buffy. This is as good as it gets."

Leaning against my pillows, wishing I could curl up into this place of darkness and warmth, and never come out again, I sat and thought about the last year. Thought about if I could have changed in such a fundamental way and not even known it. The memories slide through my mind, slick and smooth, a twisting canopy of thought and emotion. Thought about changes, about actions and reactions and of all the things that were different now.

"This is what Spike sees in me, isn't it? In Dawn and in me? He sees that we aren't human."

"Yeah, probably." Willow's voice was reluctant. She was still not thrilled about the Spike thing. Not thrilled about any of this. There was probably enough not-thrill in this very moment to ensure that neither Willow nor me would ever be happy again. This was the anti-thrill.

I felt exhaustion wash through like a living force, stealing energy, stealing strength.

"Okay, okay." I slumped back in bed, caught again by the strange softness of this human life I was trying to live. Trying and failing. My humanity was gone; everything was gone. "Okay, Willow, you have to go now. I'm crashed. You have you have to go."

Willow struggled up from the bed, tried to find her feet underneath her. As she got to the door, she turned and looked back at me. It was all I could do to keep my eyes open. This was too much, too much, death was rushing at me again, the death of the sleep, the forgetfulness of night, the darkness stealing into my mind. But keeping a friend may be the only human thing left to me, and I pushed to keep that, would hang on that with tooth and nail. Nature red in tooth and claw I thought and realized again how much of human was truly animal. I could fight this; I could try to find myself again.

"Buffy, can you forgive me?"

"I don't know, Willow, but I can try to forget." The words were whispered, my last bit of spirit fading away with the rising sun. I was barely awake enough to see Willow come back in and kiss me goodnight, could not even stir in response, or manage a smile. The day had stolen me, sleep had stolen me, and there were no more words to say.


	7. Catch

**The Only Love I Know**

_So come, my friends, be not afraid.  
We are so lightly here.  
It is in love we are made;  
In love we disappear.  
Though all the maps of blood and flesh  
Are posted on the door,  
There's no one yet who has told us_

_What Boogie Street is for._

-Leonard Cohen "Boogie Street"

Going to sleep as the sun rises makes waking up a whole different experience. When I opened my eyes to a new night, there was a brief moment when I felt swamped in confusion, wondering where the day went. And then everything Willow and I had talked about that morning came rushing back up on me, over me, and I wished the confusion would come back. Not a good sign that, wishing that I could go back to a place and time where I didn't know anything, when I was lost and bemused. Then again, there was very little in my life nowadays that didn't seem like a bad omen, like a banshee wailing out its dirge for the soon to die. How soon? How long could I expect to live like this?

My soul. I had lost my soul. I was barely more than Spike was now, not human, just not a demon. At least Willow had seemed sure about that. No demon-ness here, just the unavoidable side-effects of losing half your soul and then being pulled back from the dead against your will. At least in heaven, it hadn't mattered that she wasn't so human any more, nothing had mattered there, because all my questions had been answered and everything was sure. It was only here on earth that I didn't know how to be. Could this all really be so simple as that I was mad and didn't want to show it because they wanted so badly to think that they had done a good deed?

Struggling with the thoughts that wanted to keep me heavy and still in bed, I pushed myself up out of bed and stared at the darkness outside my window. A whole day, I had let sleep steal a whole day from me. Not a human thing, and those small distinctions were becoming very important to me now, the careful remembrance of what a human would do. If that was all that was left to me, if that was all I could be, I would grab for it with both hands and never look back. I could do this, I could wear my humanity like a mask and hope that someday it became real again.

I stumbled aimlessly to the closet, gazed unseeing into it into, my mind registering that clothes would be good. Engaged-Xander might like a clothes-free Buffy but there would be hell to pay with Anya. Hell to pay. That was a good one. Wouldn't the gang just love it if any part of me went to hell, so that they could feel all righteous in bringing me back again. But no, those thoughts were the kind that brought my inner demons out to play and I didn't want to fight them. I was trying for human tonight. Carefully, I tried to pay attention to the choices I was making, tried to take any sort of pleasure in the things that used to bring me joy. That was a cute outfit, it looked like something the old Buffy would wear. And make-up to go along with it, a mask to cover the face that showed too much truth. No one could know. No one could find out what I am now. Only Willow, because she had found out. And Spike, because...

Why Spike? Why had that thought crept so insidiously into my mind? I had never meant for him to be the kind of demon, the kind of man, that I could confide in, that I would go running to and share all my deepest secrets. He was supposed to be a distraction, a mindless way to kill the time after slaying and before going home. He was never supposed to matter to me. And yet, all I could think of now was to wonder what he would have to say to this latest piece of information, if he would care, if he would be disappointed, if he would be thrilled. Maybe it mattered to him that I was no longer quite the human that I had been before.

Ghost-like, insubstantial, I drifted down to the first floor of the house, where I could hear the sounds of people who had no doubt they were alive and well. Once more into the breach, dear friends, a vague remainder of high school English whispered to her, and I laughed at the thought, a bitter, humorless laugh. When did the fighting get easy and the friendships become almost impossible? There was no good here, there was nothing that I could understand or change, and yet I walked on regardless, desperate for the feel of my old humanity again. Desperate to feel anything with my old friends, the only thing I had left of a family. So I would try, even if it felt like there was less of me left every day now. There had to be something left. I had to have come back for something besides the killing, something beside the fight, and the pain that Spike brought to me, wrapped in shining pleasure. There had to be some old pleasures that I could find, some way to find out who I was these days.

I could feel a choice barreling down on me, a decision that needed to be made. Willow had showed me a cross-roads last night, two paths that I thought I would never have to take. I remembered from Giles' many teachings all the myths that surround a cross in the road. This was where you lost your soul. This was where the devil waited for you, willing to make a deal. People were hanged at crossroads, so their souls would be trapped. Here was where the dragons really waited, not in the cool, clean spaces on the edges of maps. This was where truth and temptation wrapped around me so tight it felt like it was stealing the very air out of my lungs. The weight of dreams and thoughts that had been coiled around me since my late waking began to dissipate, and it became easier to think, easier to understand. Now was the time for the choice. Maybe the only time. Whatever I did tonight, there may be no easy way to go back. There was no telling how much time I had on this my third chance at living. Maybe this was what I had always been walking to meet. Maybe this was destiny, slow in arrival but as implacable as death.

The voices lured me towards the kitchen, drew me into warmth and love. They were me family, are myfamily, the only thing that I has left of a family now, and I want to be with them. But outside, the sun's gone down, Spike is waiting, there are demons to kill. There is my real life to get to and it calls to me so strongly I can barely fight it. The night, it wants me, sings to me like nothing else ever has in the past. It's like Willow's words have opened up whole new avenues in my mind, and the humanity I barely remembered before has been lost in a rush of new cravings, new needs that I don't have a name for. My dreams had been rich last night, a vivid and fiery red, and they unlocked thoughts that I had never truly considered before. I understood now what it was that I was, understood what I was made for. The kill, destruction, fields drenched in the blood of demons, the only force strong enough to fight them all back; this is the life I was made for. The other life, my life before, that was the life that I made, the one I fought for, and died for so many times.

Outside, Spike is waiting. I can feel him, like a prickling on my skin, a fresh burn. Steeling my nerves against the cacophony of love that is waiting for me in the kitchen, the heart of the house, I walk out the front door, shut it silently and leans against it, content to wait in the shadows that the porch is wrapped in. He'll come to me. It's been weeks now since there was even the hint, the menace, that one of them would not find the other. I don't know what he is to me, or me to him, but at least we have our rituals, the unspoken promise of the flesh. He'll come, if I wait, because, like me, he is addicted. He is as wrapped in need as I am, and unlike me, he had never shown any desire to fight it. He went willingly to this new curse, fell willingly in love with death and all its promises. It's only a matter of time till he comes.

In the meantime, there is watching the night drift across Sunnydale, the city's shadow self, a new creature damned to this half-life. I've become so used to shadows that I've given them names, like fallen constellations. From inside, I can still hear the murmur of voices, of laughter, but it's been muffled by the night. The two can only exist side by side, never as part of one another, not without a fight. Like the world underwater lives right against the surface of the earth, and yet is constantly forgotten, day and night can never truly meet.

"Love? You just going to stand there all night?" He smells like leather, like a fight, and just the faintest hint of fresh spilled blood. He moves like he's one with midnight, like he could never be anything beside what he is right now, a predator, a monster out of story books, Prince Charming gone bad, and yet still too charming.

I can feel my mouth stretch into an answering smirk. He draws the devil out in me, he always has. There were whole pieces of me that I had never found until I made him my lover. Until I stepped willing into the darkness. Careful where you walk, people say; the first step will kill you. I've met him on his on turf, his own rules, for far too long. Have turned my back on a human life to be a demon with him.

"C'mon, Buff, you just going stand there all night or are you coming?"

He has a way of saying things. His voice goes deep and dark, so that every whisper is filled with a promise he's already proven he can keep. Temptation sings in every one of my veins, every one of my nerves. I've never needed an excuse to want him, never needed anything at all but to look at him, to hear his voice. Everything before this was a lie.

Finally, as the silence stretches too thin and fine, she pushes off from the door and watches him watch her, his eyes dark with want.

"You come to me."

"Beg pardon?"

"Come up here. Come to me."

I've learned well from him, learned from the experiences he has given me, and I can make my voice as rich with longing as him. He's no more immune to the sound then I have ever been, and my call draws him like a lure.

Crossing the porch like it was a battlefield, he comes to me, presses the lean length of his body against me, and leans down to whisper in her ear, taunting, speaking sacred vows. "What, love, you want it here? Just say the word. Tell me what you want."

Tell me what you want. So many wants, so many needs, so many things that can never be said, so many things that can never be spoken. The night is one thing, it is part of time, part of the natural order of the world, a place for demons to hide and slayers to thrive. But secrets give a darkness all their own, and I've become more used to the shadows. Since my confession to Willow, my river of words spilled out into the night, the very air seems changed. I seem changed, a new creature, nameless, unknown, but not without purpose and duty. I can make something of this, I can find her own way to be.

Capturing his mouth with mine, I kiss him deeply, tasting blood, tasting smoke, tasting something that was just Spike, the flavor of poetry and bitter humor. At last, I let him go, look into his eyes heavy with need and breath against his ear. "I want you to come inside with me."

He pulls back, startled. "Thought that was the last thing you wanted, for all your so-called friends to see how you spend the night. Thought you wanted us to be secret." Try as he might, there's no missing the bitterness in his voice, the barely concealed anger. This is an old fight, a familiar fight. Spike has always had his pride, has never wanted to be good enough to do but bad enough to keep hidden. It's been near a year since he has felt any shame in his feelings, any need to hide them.

"I said to come into the house. Be with me. And them. I want you both."

He stares at me for a while, reading something in my face that I don't want to know. At last, he seems content, seems willing to do as I asked. Grabbing my hand in his own, he holds the door open like the gentleman he says he stopped being a century ago. "Mind if I ask what changed your mind so all of a sudden?"

"Willow told me what I am. I understand now, and I guess... I guess I can deal with it."

"So you a demon or what?" His voice is eager with anticipation, with a burning need for me to be like him, a creature with no connection to those around me. And in the wrong way, he's right. There's only one other thing like me in all the world. And that other is waiting for me in the kitchen.

I shrug, growing strangely comfortable with the idea. "Not a demon. Not a human. Just the slayer."

I arch a glance at him, laughter hiding in my face. Just a slayer, just vengeance coming for him. Luckily Spike has never been the shy sort, and if loving me will lead him to an early death, I have no doubt he will follow gladly. Just as I will. Our deaths are promised to each other now, and all the life we have between us.

He grins at my words, his usual cocky, king of the walk grin, and he pulls me close for a second, breaths in the scent of my life beating just under my fragile skin. "Kinky," he whispers. "I could get used to this."

I can feel the laugh explode out of me, a feeling that I have almost forgotten. For a second, it can even crowd out my demon anger, the difference that lies at the very heart of mer. Nothing is changed; nothing is different. My life will continue as it has been, my control gone, my darkness growing, but there is still room for me in the light. I can feel Spike's hand in mine, cold and rough, no human touch, and I take comfort in it, the comfort of the grave. Midnight still lurks in my blood like a poison, and the ways of humans drifts farther and farther out of reach, but maybe, just maybe, I can make this half-life work. Pulling Spike after me, I push open the door to the kitchen and greet the silence that my entrance has caused.

They're staring. Staring at Spike and staring at the bruises that I didn't bother to cover, some part of me having known before I did what choice I would make this night. I can see they're all putting two and two together, that they don't like the answer they're getting. But Willow looks almost relieved, and if she is surprised to see Spike in here, too, she's doing a good job of hiding it. No one else looks pleased, except maybe Dawn, but that doesn't matter. From now on, I'm making her own life. It's the only choice I have left, the only way I know how to be any more. I know without looking that Spike is next to me, standing tall and belligerent, daring the Scoobies to do their worst. We can take it, Spike and me. We can take anything.

No more secrets.

No more lies.

This was my life now.

_By the rivers dark  
I wandered on  
I lived my life  
in Babylon._

_And I did forget  
My holy song:  
And I had no strength  
in Babylon._

_By the rivers dark  
Where I could not see  
Who was waiting there  
Who was hunting me._

_And he cut my lip  
And he cut my heart.  
So I could not drink  
From the river dark._

_And he covered me,  
And I saw within,  
my lawless heart  
And my wedding ring._

_I did not know  
And I could not see  
Who was waiting there  
Who was hunting me_

_By the rivers dark  
I panicked on  
I belonged at last  
To Babylon._

-Leonard Cohen "By the Rivers Dark"

The End


End file.
